Looking to the Dollar, Gold, and "Mutti" to Save the World

By Alan Caruba

The most formidable couple in the world during the 1980s was Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher, a conservative and a woman of iron will, must be looking across the Channel with some amusement to see how her German counterpart, Chancellor Angela Merkel, is literally the only person keeping the European economy from collapsing and, it must be said, taking England and America with it.

The cover article of this week’s Business Week noted that “Merkel is the daughter of a Lutheran pastor. She won a PhD for a thesis on quantum chemistry…though childless, she is known as Mutti, for Mother.” Born in the post-war years, “Merkel’s worldview reflects the German desire for stability. Chaos plagued the German-speaking people long before there was a German nation…Later the hyperinflation of the 1920s and Depression of the 1930s, both of which undermined the middle-class, gave rise to Nazism.”

Plainly said, Angela Merkel is showing the rest of the world why Keynesian economics doesn’t work; that governments with huge “entitlement” programs and a tendency to throw vast amounts of money at their problems invite disaster. If Europe does not plunge into chaos, it will be because she refused to bail it out with the deutschmark.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is moving billions to Europe to ease its lending crisis.

If you read just one book this year, I recommend James Rickards’ “Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis” ($26.95, Portfolio Penguin). An advisor to the Department of Defense, the U.S. Intelligence community, and major hedge funds on global finance, he brings more than thirty years’ experience to a book that explains what has gone so terribly wrong and why.

Rickards spells out how the U.S. economic system has been gamed over the years to ensure that “elites captured most of that growth in income and profits.” It is the reason we are just learning that many members of Congress have grown wealthy using insider information, an act that would land anyone else in jail.

“Over time and with increasing complexity, returns on investment in society begin to level off and turn negative…Bureaucracies that started out as efficient organizations turn into inefficient obstacles to improvement more concerned with their own perpetuation than with service to society.”

This is a definition of the U.S. Departments of Education, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Health, and Energy, along with the quintessential monster, the Environmental Protection Agency. For good measure, include Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage loan agencies.

In a chapter titled “Endgame—Paper, Gold or Chaos?” Rickards looks at the weakness of the U.S. dollar, pointing out that “As the dollar and sterling were trading places in the 1920s and 1930s, there was never a time when at least one was not anchored to gold.”

“Gold is not a commodity. Gold is not an investment. Gold is money par excellence. It is truly scarce—all the gold ever produced in history would fit in a cube of twenty meters (about sixty feet) on each side, approximately the size of a small suburban office building.”

“Today, under Bernanke’s guidance, the United States is trying to do what England did in 1931—devalue…What is happening instead is that all the major currencies are devaluing against gold at once. The result is global commodity inflation, so that beggar-thy-neighbor has been replaced with beggar-the-world.”

Rickards’ book is a warning against what we are witnessing. “Perhaps the most likely outcome of the currency wars and the debasement of the dollar is a chaotic, catastrophic collapse of investor confidence resulting in emergency measures by governments to maintain some semblance of a functioning system of money, trade and investment.”

The two currency wars of the last century led to two world wars. Rickards warns that “The path of the dollar is unsustainable and therefore the dollar will not be sustained.” A return to the gold standard “offers the best chance of stability.”

Rickards recommends that the big banks be required to become smaller and that derivatives be banned because “they serve banks and dealers through high fees and poorly understood terms.” Derivatives are contracts between two parties that define the value of underlying variables. The “bundling” of mortgages that were then sold as assets is an example and, as the financial crisis revealed, their value was dubious at best, criminal at worst.

“The dollar,” says Rickards, “for all its faults and weaknesses, is the pivot of the entire global system of currencies, stocks, bonds, derivatives and investments of all kinds. It is the store of economic value in a nation whose moral values are historically exceptional and therefore a light to the world. The debasement of the dollar cannot proceed without the debasement of those values and that exceptionalism.”

The coming national election will be a choice between a President who does not believe the United States of America is exceptional and whoever the Republican Party selects to help the nation return to its fundamental values.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

A High Stakes Clash of Economists

By Alan Caruba

“We need an impulse, a jolt, an acceleration…Let us experiment with boldness on such lines, even though some of the schemes may turn out to be failures, which is very likely.”

Who said that? Was it President Obama? Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Neither. It was John Maynard Keynes, a British economist. The year was 1924 and England, still struggling to recover from the cost of World War One, was trying to figure out what steps to take. The British economy was suffering from high interest rates, falling prices, and high unemployment.

Keynes’ view was that the government had to spend lots of money on public housing, better roads, and improvements to the electricity grid to get money into general circulation, stimulate the economy, and restore business confidence. The unemployed had to be given work even if it was the government not private enterprise that would provide the capital.

Keynes was already world famous because of his role as a British Treasury negotiator at the Paris Peace Conference, a precursor to the Treaty of Versailles. He had written a book, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”, that revealed the disastrous path the treaty has set Europe upon, the beggaring of Germany and Austria that led to the rise of Hitler and World War Two.

His economic theories would eventually take his name and, ultimately, his magnum opus, “A General Theory”, would enshrine him in the pantheon of the most famed economists. Succeeding generations of economists and even politicians would call themselves Keynesians.

A quite thoroughly unknown economist, Friedrich Hayak, an Austrian who was sixteen years younger, took a far different view. While Keynes thought economics must be applied to improve the lives of people through government programs, Hayak thought that the less government interfered with the free market, the better. Indeed, the smaller the role of government, the better.

All this is told brilliantly in a new book, “Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics” ($28.95, W.W. Norton & Company) by Nicholas Wapshott, a biographer of film actors and directors, as well as political figures, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

While one might assume that economics had to be the driest of topics and two economists most people have never heard of, the least of interest, Wapshott pulls it off, explaining some fairly daunting theories, mixing in lots of history to the present day, and bringing Keynes and Hayek to life in a way that is very entertaining.

What emerges is the recognition that politicians, whether it was Roosevelt in the depth of the Depression years, George W. Bush with a huge financial crisis in 2007, or Barack Obama struggling with high unemployment in 2009, all tend to look for the shortest route out of their problem because they want to be reelected or vindicated for the steps they took. They all think government is the answer.

Hayek reflects the conservative view that government should get out of the way and let a recession yield to natural economic forces. History demonstrates that, without government involvement, they eventually go away in relatively short order.

Government, Hayek argued, is more likely to make a mess of the economy than fix it. He has been proven correct over and over again, but that doesn’t matter because it is politics, not economics, that drives politicians. Politicians do not want to appear to be doing nothing.

Keynes was for a hands-on government, intervening to save the economy and, he too has been proven correct as in the most recent steps both the U.S. and British governments took to literally push gobs of money out the door and into banks to keep the whole system from collapse. The problem, however, is that it was taxpayer’s money and the borrowing to replace it will saddle future generations with an enormous debt unless some austerity is imposed on government.

Always in Keynes’ enormous shadow, Hayek, late in life, was vindicated with a Nobel Prize, but even more when the Soviet Union collapsed after seventy-five years of imposing a central government that owned everything; property, the means of production, and still could not compete with free market economies.

Keynes, however, has seen his view fulfilled because most Western nations subscribe to some form of socialism with the kinds of programs that he advocated to protect everyone. Social Security and Medicare are the ultimate Keynesian legacy.

Keynes was your classic “top down” manipulator of an economy. Hayek was a “bottom up” believer in the natural energy of the entrepreneur, small business and corporate enterprise.

Neither, however, could calculate greed or fear into their theories though they surely were aware of both as factors driving or retarding an economy.

Neither could predict what any particular politician might do in their own best interest. In America, both Democrats and Republicans have proved to be big spenders since the end of World War Two.

One man who was not an economist understood how to bring down an economy. Keynes warned, “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency.”

Americans who have watched President Obama triple our national debt to more than $14 trillion should take note before the dollar, still the benchmark currency for the world, is debauched. Too much Keynesian government spending and borrowing will do that.

That was the warning from Standard & Poor’s when it downgraded the nation’s credit rating. Hayek would have approved.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

A Horrible Week for Global Socialism

By Alan Caruba

Over the weekend of August 6-7, the Wall Street Journal’s lead headline was “U.S. Loses Triple-A Credit Rating.”

On Monday, August 8, the Journal’s headline was “Markets Brace for Downgrade’s Toll.”

By Tuesday, August 9, it was “Downgrade Ignites a Global Sell-Off.”

On Wednesday, August 10, it was “Markets Sink Then Soar After Fed Speaks.”

Thursday, August 11, the Journal cast its eyes across the Big Pond noting that “Italy’s Woes Weigh on Europe.”

On Friday, 12, the headline said, “Stocks Swing Up in Wild Week.”

A week after the Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+, in the August 13-14 edition, the Journal took note of a “Global Crisis of Confidence”, adding that “World Policy Makers’ Inability to Agree on Fixes Led Markets on Wild Ride.”

As the new week dawned on August 15, the Journal said, “Markets Gird for Fresh Drama.”

It was a great week for dramatic headlines and a horrible week for the rest of the world. Mostly, though, it was a fulfillment of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s observation that socialism works just fine until you run out of “other people’s money.”

That is a perfect definition of “redistribution” or, as President Obama once observed, “At some point you’ve made enough money.” A more un-American statement has rarely been uttered by an American President.

The U.S. has been engaged in a huge experiment in redistribution since the years of the Great Depression when Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man who knew absolutely nothing about running a business and who had spent most of his life living off an allowance from his mother, tried everything he could think of to get the economy going again.

FDR could have tried cutting taxes. He could have encouraged Congress to avoid voting for trade barriers in a fit of protectionism. Instead, he came up with Social Security, among an alphabet soup of government programs which were a disaster when it came to encouraging private sector job creation. Not unlike President Obama's "stimulus" and other doomed-to-fail experiments

The history of Social Security is one long succession of lies that Americans have been told. By the time Lyndon B. Johnson was President, the funds set aside for Social Security payments were moved to the general fund where they could be plundered by Congress. Under President Clinton Social Security payments began to be taxed as income.

World War Two arrived in the U.S. on December 7, 1941, and full employment followed to defeat the fascists in Germany and Japan. The government that had expanded during the FDR years continued to expand.

Americans emerged from the war without a scratch on the homeland. With the exception of Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, none of our cities were bombed. We had a million battle-tested young men returning home in 1945, the GI bill let them go to college if they wanted, and by the 1950s we were on our way to being the greatest military power in the world and the greatest economy ever known.

And the federal government never stopped expanding. It needed more money, but the stock market, with occasional recessions, just kept growing too. As time went along, Great Britain and Western Europe rebuilt, alliances such as NATO were created to thwart the Soviet Union’s ambitions, while Eastern Europe stagnated under Soviet imposed communism.

In Asia, Japan became an economic powerhouse and South Korea too. China which had suffered under Chairman Mao waited until he died to convert its economy to a capitalist model, while retaining all the worst aspects of an Orwellian communist government. In the Middle East, oil allowed nations led by a handful of tribal chiefs and assorted despots acquire wealth beyond belief. Their populations remained oppressed. Now they are in the streets demanding freedom and justice. They will get Sharia law and more oppression.

Economies became increasingly global and interconnected. Europe became the European Union, a huge bureaucratic mess with the Euro as a common currency. Western bankers purchased Europe’s securities and vice versa. When the housing market imploded in September 2008, they discovered that most were de-linked from the original mortgage assets and were essentially worthless to the tune of billions.

The Federal Reserve responded by shipping $600 billion to prop up European central banks and Congress responded by authorizing the Treasury Department to “bail out” U.S. banks and the huge insurance company, AIG, with public funds--your money.

So what have we learned from all this? Foremost of all, socialist economies are inherently unfair and disconnected from the real world of hard work, property ownership, and capital investment. We learned that bankers are greedy and take greater risks than they should.

Great Britain, which has become one of the greatest welfare states in the world, was rewarded for its generosity with looting and rioting by youths whose families had lived on the dole their entire lives. Greece had already had its spate of riots.

Everyone keeps saying that the U.S. must not become Greece, but the U.S. has become Greece and that accounts for all those horrible headlines from last week.

The Obama administration, which has steadfastly ignored every previous “commission” that has studied the economy, has now engineered “a super committee” in Congress. It is composed of the twelve worst ideologues on either side of the economic policy divide in an effort to cut some spending, any spending! Failure has been baked into that cake.

The old way of conducting the affairs of nations, particularly their economies, is coming apart at the seams. It has exposed the hypocrisy of socialism here in the United States and everywhere else it has been practiced.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Washington's Magical Thinking

By Alan Caruba

The term, “magical thinking”, has been around a while to describe what individuals do to cope with the vicissitudes of life. I, for example, regularly buy a Mega Millions lottery ticket in the hope of winning when, logically, rationally, I know the odds are millions to one of that ever happening.

Magical thinking can be found in all aspects of life and it is surely magical thinking that caused America’s politicians, starting back around the turn of the last century, to believe that a really big government could take care of everyone when, prior to that, self reliance, support from the family structure, and hard work were the early guiding principles.

Indeed, the U.S. Constitution is testimony to the Founding Father’s intense distrust of a centralized government—hence checks and balances—and the fallibility of individuals entrusted with power over others. It turns out they were right because now there is no aspect of our lives into which government does not intrude.

A lot of this can be traced to the rise of Communism, the handiwork of Karl Marx, and its adaptation into Socialism, a modified form. In 1917 Russia had Communism imposed on it during the Bolshevik Revolution as the antidote to the rule of the czars. In time it utterly failed, but few have taken a lesson from that. It wreaked havoc and death on Russians for over seventy years.

Indeed, throughout the last century, wars were required to defeat various forms of totalitarian rule. Even the Peoples Republic of China eventually embraced its own form of Capitalism while retaining power in the hands of a centralized government.

Communism is a kind of magical thinking based on collectivism that always seems to come back to a handful of men ruling by coercion.

In 1908, the Socialist Party nominated Eugene V. Debs to run for president. A dedicated unionist, Debs had studied Marxism while in jail. What he believed then is still prevalent today. “When I joined the Socialist Party,” said Debs in accepting the nomination, “I was taught that the wish of the individual was subordinate to the party will, and that when the party commanded it was my duty to obey.”

“I am not satisfied with things as they are,” said Debs, “and I know that no matter what administration is in power, even were it a Socialist administration, there will be no material change in the condition of the people until we have a new social system based upon the mutual economic interests of the people; until you and I and all of us collectively own those things that we collectively need and use.” Debs was soundly defeated.

The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, brought socialism to its zenith of power in America. He remained in office from 1933 until his death in 1945. Social Security is collectivism. Medicare and Medicaid is collectivism. Government “make work” programs are collectivism.

A government that owns an auto company is collectivism. A government that can shut down oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is collectivism. A government that decides how much mileage the car you buy must achieve is collectivism. A government that thwarts the building of new utilities to meet the needs of a growing population and then instructs people to reduce their use of electricity is collectivism.

And a government that believes it can continue to borrow and borrow and borrow from the rest of the world to maintain sixty percent of its annual budget for “entitlement programs” is engaged in magical thinking.

It is magical thinking to believe that the same ratings organizations, Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s, should be trusted. They both granted top grades to the “government entities”, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which plunged the nation into a huge financial crisis. Indeed, the rating organizations never saw the implosion of Wall Street institutions coming until billions in public funds were needed to keep a complete collapse from occurring.

Spending more to get out of debt is magical thinking and yet that is the only “plan” the Democrats and the President offer the public. A July 25 Wall Street Journal editorial, “Toying with Default”, provided an insight to this saying, “Here’s a number for the debt history books: Mr. Obama’s final offer in the Biden talks was a $2 billion cut in 2012 discretionary spending. The federal government spends more than $10 billion a day.”

At a time when European nations are imposing major austerity programs, the Republican Party is charged with having to save the nation from a Democrat Party that has reluctantly concluded that a reduction in spending is necessary and increase in taxes is not achievable..

As a nation, if we are to survive, we must disengage ourselves from a century of “progressive” programs that are not based in reality. Debts must be paid. Entitlement programs must be revised and eventually abandoned. Government must be reduced in size and scope. Private enterprise must be set free to function and thrive.

Earlier generations fought a Revolution to free ourselves from the British monarchy and parliament. Earlier generations fought a Civil War to preserve the Union. A present-day older generation of Americans fought two major wars against totalitarian governments and lesser ones in Korea, Vietnam, and most recently in Iraq.

The present generation of Americans must empower Republicans in Congress to save the nation from the errors of the past, the wild spending, and the confiscatory effort to “transform” the nation into a collectivist society that mirrors failed “progressive”, Communist and Socialist thinking and programs.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

A World That's Coming Unglued

By Alan Caruba

After you’ve read history for a number of years, you begin to realize that the world goes crazy every so often. People and nations just lose their wits. It’s usually in times of great change when old truths or old ways of doing things are thrust aside by new discoveries, new technologies, or just the renewal of old pathologies.

Instances of this include the Crusades, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of fascism in the last century.

I think we are in a comparable period, for how long or short I cannot say, but to quote from Star Wars, “There’s a disturbance in the universe” or, to be more specific, among the nations of planet Earth.

Part of the problem is the sheer size of the human population. We now number in excess of six billion and there are serious issues of how to feed all of us, ensure clean water, employment, and, of course, the provision of the energy that fuels societies dependent on electricity.

Photos from space of the Earth at night tell one everything about which parts of the Earth are enjoying the benefits of electricity and which are not.

In the past, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, war, famine, disease, and death could be counted on to keep populations in check, but advances in technology, medicine, and agriculture have tipped the balance in favor of humanity.

Beyond sheer numbers, there is the problem of profligate spending that has several European nations, as well as the United States of America, in deep financial trouble. The merry-go-round of borrowing to keep bloated budgets afloat cannot continue indefinitely despite the efforts of central bankers to do so. Merely printing money has always led to bad events from riots to wars.

The financial problems are tied to the worst economic systems ever created, first as Communism, then its modified version, Socialism. Neither work. While politicians of every stripe like Socialism as a way to “redistribute” wealth, the entire system is confiscatory and based on coercion. It usually impoverishes the middle class of workers while creating an ever-growing class of those who will not or cannot work.

As harsh as Capitalism can be, it does work. It involves high levels of risk, often large amounts of investment, and it allows for failure. It is also the greatest engine of growth and the development of new industries, new technologies, and improved lives. Like fish in water, we are oblivious to the miracle a single supermarket represents.

All economic systems must strive to cope with corruption and, so long as there are three humans on Earth, there will be corruption. Having recently descended from the trees to walk upright, humans are subject to their aggressive nature.

Communism and Socialism promise equal misery. Capitalism offers the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of making the right investment guesses or developing new and better things people want to own. Competition improves life for everyone.

In sum, the clash between economic systems is still being worked out with nations that grant as much liberty as possible to their populations doing best. Where power is concentrated in a few, their populations and their nations do not prosper. As regards the world’s population, a huge cohort is young, unemployed and combustible.

It is the quest, the demand for more personal and political liberty that is causing much of the upheavals extant and no where is this more obvious than in those nations where Islam has been the prevailing religion. Islam translates as “submission.” It is based in seventh century strictures on how life should be lived. It is at war with modernity. It cannot prevail, but until it reforms or fails, there will be terrorism and war.

The greatest threat to humanity is the presence and continued quest for nuclear weapons. They are genocidal, capable of killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Allowing Iran, a nation led by a handful of crazed theocrats, to acquire nuclear parity poses a threat to humanity that has never existed before. Permitting North Korea or Pakistan to retain their nukes can only result in a bad outcome.

Like a rumbling volcano, the tremors felt as the result of the United States being led by a dedicated Communist and likely Muslim is a destabilizing factor not only for its citizens, but for others around the world.

It is up to the present leaders of the world to thread their way through the upheavals and divisions causing growing instability. Some will do it better than others. Some will cling to failed systems and philosophies of the past. Some will simply pursue power for power’s sake.

Alliances will change. Allies will become enemies. Enemies will become allies. Nations will pursue their shifting interests.

For the world in general, a good start would be the abandonment of the United Nations, an institution that failed initially as the League of Nations, and which is now so putrid with corruption and schemes to impose a one-world government that it poses a threat to the sovereignty of all nations.

Just as neighborhoods thrive when the common interests of neighbors for security and peace are observed, international organizations designed to concentrate power inevitably fall short of their heralded benefits.

In the same way shifts in the Earth’s tectonic plates, volcanic eruptions, and the latest cooling cycle are posing massive challenges for humanity, the nations of the world are trying to cope with changes in the financial universe they have created as well as outmoded concepts of security.

How the present upheavals, financial, religious, and demographic work themselves out remains unknown. In a neighborhood people find it best to “get along.” In a world beset with rival systems of belief and governance, the outcome is far more murky and, ultimately, more threatening.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Celebrating Reagan

By Alan Caruba

This year marks the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth on February 6, 1911, but I want to celebrate the anniversaries of his first and second inauguration, January 20, 1981 and January 21, 1985. Just as Reagan transitioned from being a liberal and a Democrat, his presidency did the same for me.

What remains a mystery to me is how America could rocket from the success of the Reagan presidency and that of George H.W. Bush, Reagan's Vice President, to the depths of Bill Clinton’s scandals.

For those with short memories, Americans followed Reagan/Bush with a president who engaged in a tawdry encounter with a White House intern, who lied under oath, was disbarred, but whose personal popularity and a cynical Congress allowed him to escape impeachment.

Reagan was elected in part as a rejection of the weak presidency of his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, who until the election of Barack Obama, has been regarded as the worst president since the end of World War Two.

Unlike Obama who has never lost an opportunity to denigrate America, Reagan never lost an opportunity to lift up our spirits and to celebrate the nation. He said, “Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears; to your confidence, rather than your doubts.”

“My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty’s lamp guiding your steps and opportunity’s arm steadying your way. What I’d really like is to go down in history as the President who made Americans believe in themselves again.”

In his first inaugural speech, Reagan said, “It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams.”

The contrast between the Reagan presidency and that of the current occupant of the office is vast. Reagan understood the American can-do spirit. He celebrated a culture in which striving for wealth was understood to be a worthy goal. Obama believes being wealthy is a sign of exploiting others and of greed. He made it clear during the campaign that he wanted to be President in order to distribute the wealth of individual working Americans.

That’s straight out of the Communist Manifesto and, apparently, too many were simply not listening, dazzled by the notion of electing the first Black President.

In his first election, Reagan won by a significant majority of the popular vote, 44 million to Carter’s 36 million, despite a third party candidate, John Anderson, who won 6 million votes. He swept the electoral vote, 489 to 49, bringing with him 33 Republican Representatives and 11 Senators. Under Reagan, Republican control of the Senate returned for the first time since 1945.

Obama’s first and hopefully last term has already recorded a historic turnover of power in the House to Republicans and a diminishing of Democrat power in the Senate in response to his policies.

The conservative movement in America rose from the ashes of Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 to Lyndon Johnson. In retrospect, it was the same torrent of liberal legislation under LBJ and the expansion of the war in Vietnam that deeply offended Americans. Elected to end the war in Vietnam, Richard M. Nixon would disgrace himself with the Watergate scandal.

To date, Obama’s presidency marks the most dramatic and traumatic lurch toward naked socialism since the days of Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It was the liberal legislation rammed through Congress by Sen. Harry Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi that led to the rise of the Tea Party movement and a rejection of Obama’s agenda. The new Congress knows it is charged with repealing or defunding Obamacare, a vast expansion of Medicare and Medicaid. Both represent the socialist agenda of the Democrat Party that has brought the nation to the brink of insolvency.

The most casual look back over the years since the end of the Truman administration shows Americans lurching back and forth between scandals and weakness, between the leadership of Eisenhower and Reagan, to the current President who has increased the national debt more than all the previous presidents combined.

Americans, however, never truly abandoned their belief in an ever-growing federal government as the provider of all their needs. Indeed, even under Reagan, the federal government grew in size.

We arrive at the Reagan centennial as a nation burdened by an intrusive government, a history of entitlement programs dating back to FDR, massive civil service unions, and too much spending that has left the nation facing the largest debt in its history. We might as well have been drunk for the last eight decades.

“Any government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take everything you have!" warned Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States (1801-1809).

Too many generations of Americans have not paid heed to that fundamental truth, the essence of conservatism. The time to reverse threats to our Constitution and to the future as a nation is now.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Adrift on an Ocean of Lies

By Alan Caruba

“The men the American public admires most extravagantly are the daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”  -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

One of the insights that age provides is that we are all adrift on an ocean of lies from the moment we are born to when we pass from this world. So much of what we initially “know”, taught to us at home and in school, broadcast via newspapers, radio and television, in the workplace, and, in particular, requiring us to make decisions about the politicians we select to govern in our name, are lies.

The British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, categorized them as “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Lies and lying, however, may be the natural order of life because even nature employs lies when various species devise ways to camouflage themselves either as a means to deceive and lure prey or to avoid becoming prey.

The prevalence of lies in the affairs of men and nations accounts for why the U.S. has a CIA and a NSA, two giant intelligence and counter-intelligence operations. It is why a third branch of our government is the judiciary.

Americans are now experiencing an avalanche of lies in the form of political ads, media reporting intended to sway the outcome of the forthcoming elections, and the pronouncements and predictions of various politicians and pundits. Not all are lying, but it is safe to presume that most are.

The rise of talk radio and the popularity of personalities such as Rush Limbaugh are based on a hunger for the truth. The revelation that National Public Radio has a deliberate leftist agenda enraged many who genuinely enjoy its programs.

The great anger driving the midterm elections is directly traceable to the lies of the President, his administration, and the Democrat leadership in Congress. Beyond and behind these lies is a mortgage banking system that had been in place for years leading up to the moment that the critical housing market collapsed. The “American dream” of a home must still be earned and paid for. There is no free lunch.

Simply said, making loans to people who were never expected to repay them, turning around and selling those mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government entities who in turn “bundled” those bad loans and sold them as securities to banks and investment house was, in hindsight, a system that had to fail at some point.

Passing a “financial reform” act that did not mention Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while vastly expanding the Securities and Exchange Commission only compounded the lies.

The elections are about the lies told to sell Obamacare, to hide the real numbers of unemployed, to shut down oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and to insanely increase the national debt by borrowing more in two years than all previous administrations combined had done since George Washington was president.

The lies came at a dizzying pace from the day President Obama was sworn into office.

He told the world that America is not a Christian nation.

He said that “green jobs” were an answer to no jobs.

He said that Medicare “reform” was not a lie designed to implement a governmental takeover of healthcare, one-sixth of the nation’s economy.

He said that General Motors and Chrysler were taken over as wards of the federal government instead of being permitted to reorganize (shake loose of union demands) under the normal process of bankruptcy.

He said the stimulus act was a solution to a stagnant economy when it was, in fact, a laundry list of Democrat earmarks, a “porkulus” bill.

He pushed for a Cap-and-Trade act to sell “carbon credits” as the lies about global warming were crashing around the world. This is the year that the Chicago Climate Exchange will end carbon trading.

The President who dazzled so many with soaring oratory during his campaign proved so inept at explaining his actions that his formal press conferences virtually ceased while his access to the nation’s print and broadcast media increased.

His use of Teleprompters became a national joke.

In a world where lies and the use of violence have always been a driving force throughout human history, where greed is instinctual, we should not be surprised at the folly with which we are surrounded, but we can and must strive to educate ourselves about the truths that are essential to the survival of our form of governance and the future of America.

We can learn that humans have nothing to do with the Earth’s climate; that nothing compares with or can replace the original, totally natural biofuels—oil, coal, and natural gas—that socialism/communism always enslaves and always fails; and that telling the truth is always superior to telling a lie.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Is Barack Obama the Ultimate Sleeper Agent?

By Alan Caruba

Not far from where I live in New Jersey, in Montclair, Richard and Cynthia Murphy were arrested as Russian sleeper agents, allegedly in the employ of the SVR, the successor to the famed Soviet KGB intelligence services that waged a covert war throughout the Cold War.

Much of the media attention was focused on a beautiful redhead, Anna Chapman, a Manhattan socialite who was charged as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, but largely unnoted was Mihail Semenko, a 28-year-old Seton Hall University graduate. I live in the same community where the university is located.

In all, ten people were arrested by the FBI, suspected of carrying out long-term “deep cover” assignments in the U.S. for Russia.

The ultimate “deep cover” agent, however, may well be Barack Obama.

My friend, Henry Lamb, writing on October 8, 2007 at Canada Free Press.com, said, “It is getting increasingly difficult to distinguish between the agenda of the Democratic Party and the agenda of the Communist Party.” He quoted Joelle Fishman, chairman of the Communist Party USA Political Action Committee and chairman of the Connecticut Communist Party.

“Our Party has an important role to play to keep the focus on the fight for a new direction in our country for jobs, healthcare, and an end to the war. This is how the 2008 elections will be won.” Universal healthcare, a major objective of the Obama administration, has since become the law of the land. The emphasis on withdrawal from Iraq and a specific date for withdrawal from Afghanistan has been another objective.

The campaign team, several of whom now serve as advisers to Obama, was composed of people with deep ties to the “progressive”, i.e., communist movement in America. Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor, was aware that former Green Czar, Van Jones, had a long history of involvement in Communist Party causes. When this was exposed, he resigned.

Jarrett married into a family with Communist Party involvement. Her father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, worked closely with Obama mentor and a Communist Party leader, Frank Marshall Davis, who was a member of a number of front groups during the Cold War years. It was Davis whom Obama’s grandparents enlisted to mentor him during his formative years growing up in Hawaii.

Political advisor, David Axelrod, has a long history of working for socialist causes. His mother wrote for a New York City tabloid, PM Magazine that often promoted the Communist Party line. Much of the publication’s funding came from Marshall Field, a leftist millionaire who also funded Saul Alinsky’s training school for community organizers.

Carol Browner, the energy and environmental advisor, was a former director of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Clinton. Significantly, she was a member of the Commission for a Sustainable World Society of the Socialist International until that was revealed and her name was scrubbed from the organization’s website on January 7, 2009. Both she and Todd Stern, the Environment Czar, are strong advocates of Cap-and-Trade legislation.

A litany of high level advisors with strong socialist agendas surrounds the President.

Experts in spy craft are not inclined to regard the arrested agents as a small group to be dismissed as bumblers in the employ of the Russian Federation, the successor to the failed Soviet Union. None, however, have been charged with espionage.

Nina Khrushcheva, the daughter of former Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, and a professor of international affairs at the New School in Manhattan, said, “We are pretty sure there are some dark forces overseeing Russian security. That’s how we do things. That’s how we used to do things. And people don’t think that it has changed.”

In a memo to the Murphy’s, their Russian handler reminded them, “You were sent to USA for long-term service trip. Your education, bank accounts, car, house, etc—all these serve one goal: fulfill your main mission, i.e., to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in U.S. and send intel (intelligence reports) to (center).”

Many questions regarding Obama’s past remain hidden. Beyond the issue of whether he is a natural born citizen eligible to hold the office, most of the paper trail concerning his education at Occidental College in Los Angeles, followed by Columbia University and Harvard, and the funding for his tuition, his travel to Pakistan as a youth, and other factors normally made public during a campaign are still kept secret.

In his memoir, “Dreams of my Father”, Obama wrote, “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors…”

Perhaps most telling is his political rise that began in the Chicago living room of former Weatherman domestic terrorists, William Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, who held a fundraiser for his campaign to become a senator in the Illinois legislature. In a book, “Sixties Radicals”, Ayers described himself, saying “I’m a radical, leftist, small ‘c’ communist.”

Obama and Ayers had spent three years together serving on the board of the Woods Fund. Obama’s campaign claim that he knew the Ayers only because they lived in the same Chicago neighborhood was patently false.

The members of the Russian spy group lived a false life while allegedly serving the interests of their handlers. One can only wonder if Barack Obama’s life has also been devoted to the same communist agenda as the ultimate agent of influence?

© Alan Caruba, 2010

How the U.S. Can Become Greece

By Alan Caruba

I find it interesting that an entire nation like Greece can face bankruptcy.

Greece will be loaned billions that it is not likely to ever repay. Meanwhile, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland are financially shaky as well. England is not much better off and the United States is printing money in the basement of the Federal Reserve while also borrowing it from China, Japan, and everyone else.

Our current miseries can be traced in part to too much government intervention and too many regulations. My hero, Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, keeps track of such things and, in April, pointed out that last year Congress passed 125 bills, but federal agencies issued 3,503 final rules. Congress tasks its agencies to fill in the blanks when it passes new laws, but this now constitutes “regulation without representation,” says Crews.

The prime internal directive of government agencies, i.e., all bureaucracies, is to expand in power and budgets.

“Last year, Americans paid $989 billion in income taxes. Add to that sales taxes, property taxes, excise taxes, and other taxes, and the total tax burden comes to nearly 27 percent of national income,” notes Crews.

“Last year alone, the deficit was $1.4 trillion. This year’s deficit is expected to grow to around $1.8 trillion,” wrote Crews. “The hidden tax of federal regulation cost businesses and consumers an additional $1.187 trillion last year—none of which shows up in the federal budget. Regulation eats up an additional 8.3 percent of GDP.”

Capitalism can give you fits, but socialism is the doorway to financial disaster. Even the People’s Republic of China gave Karl Marx the heave-ho and has embraced capitalism. After Mao died, his successor told everyone “to get rich is glorious.”

The global embrace of socialism, particularly following World War Two, may have had something to do with a desire to avoid further wars the likes of which left all the nations involved in terrible shape. Only the U.S., shielded from the devastation of Europe, Russia, and Japan, came out in a position to thrive.

One result, however, was the creation of the United Nations, no doubt the most corrupt international organization of the modern era. It needs to be replaced with something less predatory and less in control of demagogues. A coalition of democracies is needed.

The U.N. was followed by the European Union, an organization rapidly discovering that a huge, centralized bureaucracy and its currency is vulnerable to the kind of trouble being caused by Greece. There’s a lot to be said for individual nations being in control of their own affairs and forming mutually beneficial partnerships with other nations.

In the U.S. the generation after World War Two became the Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, who were possibly the most spoiled and infantilized group in our short history.

They yielded the “counter culture” of the 1960s and the folks who have since risen to power in Congress and other elements of our society. The result was the rise of many of the nation’s societal ills that include the drug culture, the rise of feminism, and the emergence of gay and lesbian demands that, along with abortion, have undermined the keystone of society, marriage and families.

Does it surprise anyone that the president has nominated a second woman, Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court; a person who, like himself, has no paper trail, but who reportedly has a preference for abortion, gay rights, unions, and an antipathy to corporate America?

The push for “social justice” has played a major role in our current financial problems. The prime examples are two government sponsored entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Having been previously bailed out to the tune of billions, Freddie Mac has requested $10 billion more while Fannie Mae is asking for an additional $8.4 billion. The taxpayers were on the hook for $145 billion in losses when the government was forced to take control of both in 2008.

There is no legitimate reason for government to be in the mortgage business or for owning General Motors and other private enterprises. Amtrak, for example, has never made a profit under government ownership. This kind of insidious nationalization is the road to ruin.

Socialist detours into Social Security and Medicare (both programs now teeter on collapse) culminated in the election of the first Marxist president the nation has ever seen. The intention of the President and the Democrat Party in Congress is to push the nation fully into the socialist camp. That would bring about a predictable collapse.

The pushback has begun, however, in States like Virginia and New Jersey where bedrock Republican conservatism elected two governors and, even in Massachusetts where a new senator won election by opposing Obamacare.

The midterm elections in November, if power in Congress changes hands to similar minded Republicans, remains our only hope that Obamacare can be defunded and even repealed. After that, the sobering fact that government is spending and regulating far too much may occasion the changes necessary to return the nation to a philosophy of fiscal responsibility and restraint.

The Founding Fathers had a profound distrust of too much government and fashioned a Constitution that would divide power among the legislative and executive branches. It expected the Supreme Court to protect the original intention of the Constitution.

Now it is up to a new generation or two of Americans to save the greatest experiment in democracy from itself.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Obama's Shadow Government

By Alan Caruba

How many of these names do you recognize?

Adolfo Carrion, Aneesh Chopra, Ear; Devamey, Kenneth Feinberg, Carol Browner, Ed Montgomery, Todd Stern, Cass Sunstein, Ron Bloom, and John Brennan. If none of them ring a bell, it is because they and others are all part of a shadow government of some thirty “czars”; advisors to President Obama who did not submit to the Senate confirmation process and are exempt from Congressional oversight.

Article 2, Section 2, U.S. Constitution, an excerpt: He (the President) shall have power, by and with the advice and Consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States whose appointments are not herein provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or the heads of departments.” (Emphasis added)

The Constitution creates two types of positions in the executive branch: principal officers and inferior officers. The first of these are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The latter are not subject to this process.

The Obama administration began with a series of nominations that were found to be tax cheats and forced to withdraw before Senate confirmation. One of them, Van Jones, put in charge of “green jobs” was forced to resign when it became known that he was a self-identified communist. Carol Browner, responsible for environmental and energy issues, was on the board of the Commission for a Sustainable Society, the action arm of the Socialist International.

In the case of “special envoys” George Mitchell, Richard Holbrooke, and Dennis Ross, they all engage in ambassadorial duties, representing the nation to foreign entities and are responsible only to the president. Key elements of the nation’s foreign policy, particularly as regards the Middle East, remain hidden from the public, except in terms of the president’s public pronouncements.

All of the president’s cabinet secretaries in charge of various departments and agencies of the government are vested with administrative powers and all must be confirmed by the Senate. By virtue of the Administrative Procedure Act, these offices must hold public hearings and maintain records when decisions are made, thus creating a paper trail. All of these offices must have separate lines in Congress’s annual appropriations bills.

The bulk of the president’s czars are exempt from such oversight. They advise and answer directly to the president and a number of them exercise control over the decisions made by cabinet secretaries and agency directors, most of whom have been reduced to a role of carrying out their decisions, their agenda.

The U.S. government is being run out of the White House by a cohort of czars/advisors who do not answer to the American people and operate in the dark. This is part of the warning issued in “The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency.” The authors, Ken Blackwell and Ken Klukowski, are both attorneys with extensive knowledge of the Constitution. Blackwell has been an ambassador.

These czars are essentially unconstitutional and illegal.

All presidents have had advisors, but none prior to Obama have had so many and none have been delegated vast powers. They represent a violation of the separation of powers essential to a democratic republic and all violate the need and expectation of transparency and accountability.

Some have demonstrated in their past publications and present statements that they are wholly incompetent to hold such power. The regulations czar, Cass Sunstein, has said that animals should have the same legal rights as humans. The science advisor, John Holdren, has advocated putting chemicals in the drinking water or requiring devices that would neutralize fertility, including compulsory abortion.

John Brennan, the terrorism czar, responsible for homeland security, downplayed the near disaster of the Christmas “underpants bomber” and claimed that all possible intelligence that could be secured from him had been in less than an hour after his arrest!

All these czars function in direct contradiction of the long history of such advisors to presidents and in contradiction to the framework of the U.S. Constitution designed to ensure that the executive branch is answerable to Congress.

The function (or lack of it) of elected senators and representatives is ugly enough as seen in the failure of Congress to exercise caution in the passage of bills that affect the economy and the lives of all Americans. The U.S. debt has increased to levels not seen since World War Two. Obamacare was an ugly process of bribery and closed-door deals that resulted in a straight party line vote that was a repudiation of the will of the people.

No one knows what these unelected and unsupervised czars are doing, but you can be sure they all are loyal advocates and agents of the socialist transformation of America.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Obama's Ideology Threatens America

By Alan Caruba

During what can only be hoped will be the final struggle between the socialist and capitalist approach to health care the debate is focused on the cost of Obamacare, its impact on the nation’s economy, its legislative over-reach, and the fact that it will ration care.

If Obama wins, America loses. The “reforms” will ultimately end up killing people who would otherwise have survived illness or injury if it is implemented. Beyond that, Obama’s efforts to control large segments of the economy will pick up momentum.

An entire generation or more of Americans who did not live through the Cold War waged against the former Soviet Union or saw the rise of communism in China are unaware of the toll it took on humanity. In a 1997 book, “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression”, published by Harvard University, it set the death tolls at 65 million in China, 20 million in the Soviet Union, and so on. The total worldwide exceeded 100 million.

This week Americans will see if their system of government works to represent their will. When it controls the provision of health care, the government will literally have life and death authority over people.

Those who voted for Obama, giving him a fairly slim margin of victory, and those who instinctively sensed something terribly wrong in the man have now had their worst fears confirmed.

If our system of government works, it will reject Obamacare because that is what it was designed to do. The Constitution is structured to slow down the passage of a really bad law and to create obstacles to bringing it to a vote.

Only an administration with a totalitarian inclination would go to the lengths we’ve seen to pass a law that 75% of the people reject.

Obama is driven entirely by ideology and it’s the same one that motivated Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and the other dictators of the last century.

Ideologically, Obama is a communist whose views were shaped by a communist mentor in his youth. He is a true believer in the economic and social views of communism that government must control all aspects of the individual’s life and owns the fruits of his labors and earnings.

Over the years the voters have elected representatives and senators who subscribe to socialism since its introduction during the FDR era. Speaker Nancy Pelosi does not have to concern herself with the nearly 80 members of the Progressive Caucus. She has no Republican votes. It’s the other Democrats who are giving her fits.

Beyond Obamacare, there are other issues that are directly affected by his ideology and at the top of the list is the belief that the economy must be destroyed in order that a new set of governing principles be imposed. It is astonishing how the power of the executive and a highly centralized government facilitates this.

No element of government rule is safe from Obama’s clique of leftist “czars” installed to direct the various departments of government. From attempting to seize large portions of land for federal control to threats to regulate carbon dioxide, the heavy hand of socialist goals can be seen.

The administration moved swiftly to acquire control over General Motors and Chrysler instead of allowing them to go through bankruptcy for restructuring. Its “stimulus” program not only isn’t producing jobs, the number of jobless grows with every passing month.

Obama’s most troubling ideological threat to the nation is in the area of national security. In his book, “Courting Disaster”, Marc Theissen documents “how Barack Obama has exposed (CIA) secrets to the enemy, unilaterally disarmed us in the face of terror, and invited the next attack.” Another attack would be the opportunity to declare a national emergency and impose martial law.

Regarding the CIA interrogation program that produced invaluable intelligence about the structure of al Qaeda as well as its plans for more attacks, Theissen notes that “in his first forty-eight hours in office, President Obama shut the program down.” That is not the act of a man whose very oath of office requires that he swear to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” and, by doing so, protect its citizens.

The President’s ideology and that of his Attorney General blinded both to the obvious idiocy of extending Constitutional rights to enemy combatants, men not even protected by the Geneva Convention rules of warfare. The announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be tried in New York City produced instant and widespread outrage.

Outrage has also been demonstrated by the thousand and more TEA Party (Taxed Enough Already) groups that have sprung up around the nation. Their protests are being heard despite the effort of the mainstream media to marginalize them.

The best thing Barack Obama could do for his nation would be to submit his letter of resignation as President. He’s not likely to do that because he is too busy trying to destroy America.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Accelerating the Speed of Lies

By Alan Caruba

“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie…”

Who wrote that? The answer is Adolf Hitler in “Mein Kampf”, published in his1925 autobiography. During World War Two the U.S. government’s Office of Strategic Services, which later would evolve into the Central Intelligence Agency, assessed Hitler’s methods:

“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people would sooner or later believe it.”

I have been reading David Kupelian’s new book, “How Evil Works” and thinking a lot lately about lies, lying, and liars. At the heart of great frauds is the lie and it seems to me that Americans have lately been subjected to a surfeit of lies that began with the 2008 election campaign in which a virtually unknown, first term Illinois Senator announced he was running for President.

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” is attributed to Mark Twain and the truth of that is more evident than ever because technology has increased the speed with which lies travel. It has, fortunately, also given speed to those who debunk the lies and the result is a dizzying avalanche of conflicting claims.

Being ignorant of the intent of our nation’s Founding Fathers, of the limitations on the federal government found in the U.S. Constitution, of the deliberate separation of powers in our government’s executive, judicial, and legislative branches, and of history in general puts people at a disadvantage to recognize a threat to the nation and their freedom.

Edgar Watson Howe, (1853-1937) a newspaper and magazine editor in the early years of the last century said, “Americans detest all lies except lies spoken in public or printed lies.”

I think he was reflecting on the influence of the broadcast and print media of his day, but it is no less true today. Most certainly, the presidency is an enormous platform for the person holding the office to advance policy by telling lies.

A President, however, who is perceived to be a serial liar, soon begins to lose credibility and popularity. President Obama’s credibility and popularity has fallen at an astonishing rate in just over a year in office.

It is worth noting, too, that the credibility of newspapers as a source of objective reporting has been in decline as the Internet has grown, offering an enormous number of news and opinion websites from which anyone can determine the truth or falsehood of public debate.

The English publisher and writer, Ernest Benn (1875-1954) said, “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedy.”

We are seeing this play out in the effort to “reform” Medicare by President Obama and the Democrat Party. Even Republicans know that Medicare is in need of some changes to improve the program. Tort reform and the ability to purchase health insurance across state lines are but two improvements that make perfectly good sense to most people.

However, the reform being proffered by the White House is nothing more than a socialist expansion of a government that is already too large and too unwieldy to serve the interests of Americans. It would, as is often pointed out, destroy the best health system in the world and put one sixth of the nation’s economy under the control of government.

In the process of putting forth Medicare “reform” President Obama has told so many lies that it is only with great difficulty that one can keep track of them.

Little wonder that the great historian, Edward Gibbon, wrote that “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”

No greater modern example of this is found in the global warming fraud. Since the 1980s the deliberate distorting of “science” has been the basis for the Big Lie that the Earth’s overall temperature is rising rapidly and that mankind is responsible for it through the use of coal, oil, and natural gas as fuels for industry use and the production of electrical power.

The greatest lies of the modern era, however, have been communism and its baby sister, socialism. The deaths of millions are attributed to Communism as practiced in the former Soviet Union and in the early years of the Peoples Republic of China. Nazism, a form of socialism, led to the deaths of millions in World War Two.

Nations that have embraced socialism are experiencing serious financial crisises these days. These political systems have proven to be failures wherever they have been introduced and imposed.

The greatest domestic challenge to Americans today is the combination of socialism, a system that has been slowly introduced into the governance of the nation since the 1930s, and the recent election of a “messiah” promising “hope and change.”

Beyond and within our shores, the other Big Lie, Islam, threatens our freedoms and it too must be resisted and defeated.

Today, however, Americans need to embrace the U.S. Constitution as never before. It is our shield against despotism and the lies that advance it.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Bill Comes Due for Socialism in America

By Alan Caruba

"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." -- Margaret Thatcher, former British Prime Minister

It began as a beautiful cruise to a land of “hope and change”, but it has become a nightmare in which the ship of state is being deliberately steered toward a whirlpool of debt from which, if Obama is successful, the nation cannot escape.

One of the primary reasons the U.S. economy has grown over the years has been the confidence in its innovation and productivity. It has generated investment from around the world from those who wanted to profit from our success story. There was a time when U.S. securities were the safest in the world, but that is no longer the case.

On December 24, 2009, the U.S. Senate voted to raise the ceiling of the government debt to $12.4 trillion, described by an Associated Press reporter as “a massive increase over the current limit and a political problem that President Barack Obama has promised to address next year.”

On January 20, 2010, barely a month later, Senate Democrats “proposed allowing the federal government to borrow an additional $1.9 trillion to pay bills, a record increase that would permit the national debt to reach $14.3 trillion.”

This is the reason, by virtue of the Massachusetts special election; the United States has dodged the bullet of a “reformed” healthcare system which would have slashed a half trillion dollars from Medicare coffers while adding millions more people to its rolls.

It would have turned the health insurance industry into a public utility. They would have ceased to be private enterprises of competing companies. It would have driven physicians out of practice. It would have bankrupted the nation and reduced a widely acknowledged excellent health system to that of a third world nation.

The proposed “Cap-and-Trade” bill, a huge tax on all energy use—the lifeblood of any economy, must be defeated. This will come most likely from a lack of votes as Senate Democrats are finally scared enough of the electorate to act with some degree of rationality.

In a recent commentary, Jerome R. Corsi, the author of “America for Sale: Fighting the New World Order, Surviving the Global Depression, and Preserving USA Sovereignty”, wrote “With the recession and the huge stimulus package added to the beginning of the baby boomers retiring, United States debt is already at 50 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office estimates of the Obama administration plans as they currently stand.”

In other words, the U.S. government is committed through various “entitlement” programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, along with other expenditures, to spend more than it takes in via taxes. The other major expense is for defense. These three factors represent half of the annual U.S. budget.

The situation is so grave that, on January 18, The Washington Times editorialized that “Obama is killing the economy.”

The bill has finally come due for decades of socialism that began in the 1930s.

“The 2009 budget deficit tripled over 2008. The deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) went from 3.1 percent in 2008 to 9.9 percent in 2009. The deficit for the first month of fiscal year 2010 was $176 billion, which was greater than the $161 billion deficit for the entire 2007 fiscal year.”

At present rates, the public debt of the United States will reach 85 percent of GDP by 2018, just eight years from now, and 100 percent by 2022. It would be 200 percent by 2038 unless some brakes on spending are not applied before the ship of state gets sucked down beneath an ocean of debt.

What does President Obama propose? He wants to apply an unconstitutional special tax on banks! And not all banks, but just those banks on “Wall Street” whom he blames for the current recession.

His most recent proposal to regulate the banking system drove down the Dow Jones Average signaling further fears of his intention to micro-manage the economy. It is a recipe for disaster and shares of the big Wall Street banks in particular fell. He is deliberately attacking the great engine of the nation’s economy.

Wall Street is not the problem. The government is the problem.

Obama made no mention of the real culprits for the housing market meltdown, the reckless spending of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Community Reinvestment Act that underwrote a program that put $12 trillion of mortgage loans, half of all such loans, in the hands of the federal government!

As John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute points out, “President Obama’s proposal (would) bring back 1930s-like separation of commercial and investment banks, dubbed Glass-Steagall II or Glass-Steagall 2.0, (and) would do little to prevent the problem of financial institutions being too big to fail. What it would do is hurt economic recovery, reduce types of financing available to businesses big and small, and give European and Asian financial services firm a huge competitive advantage over their U.S. counterparts.”

The billions still unspent in the so-called “Stimulus” bill should be returned to the Treasury. Plans to expand Medicare and Medicaid need to be scrapped. Taxes on greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon dioxide, must be avoided if for no other reason that CO2 has nothing to do with a non-existent global warming.

The capacity of the United States to recover calls for an end or at least a cap on the mindless spending of taxpayer millions on the pet projects and crony deals of Representatives and Senators.

It calls for an end to the restrictions on the exploration for and extraction of the nation’s vast coal, oil and natural gas reserves, including in ANWR and aggressively in the offshore continental shelf.

It calls for an end to huge multi-million dollar subsidies for “renewable energy” schemes such as solar and wind power.

It calls for an end to the ethanol mandates that dilute the mileage of every gallon of gasoline and actually increase CO2 emissions!

It calls for an end to congressional mandates on the auto industry that have, in part, driven two of its largest manufacturers, General Motors and Chrysler, into bankruptcy. The U.S. must divest its ownership in both companies.

It calls for reining in the rogue government agency, the Environment Protection Agency that is attempting to unilaterally impose control of CO2 emissions and has long engaged in practices that impede economic growth for business, industry, and the nation’s agricultural sector.

There are many reasonable and rational steps that can and should be taken, but it seems clear that the President, with the support of a Democrat controlled Congress, has no intention of taking any of these steps and, indeed, is intent on bankrupting the U.S. government and its people.

It's Not Socialism. It's Communism.

By Alan Caruba

If you felt a frisson of fear on news that the Senate had passed Obamacare the day before Christmas, then you now know what it was and is like to live in a dictatorship. The voice of the People was ignored in a demonstration of raw political power.

There was a time when Americans took Communism seriously. It challenged us in the form of the Soviet Union and we witnessed its takeover of China.

In Europe, uprisings against Soviet rule were crushed in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in the 1980s gave proof that only oppression can sustain this failed economic and political system. President Reagan gave voice to it when he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”

The McCarthy hearings in the 1950s proved a setback for efforts to learn how thoroughly infiltrated the U.S. government had become by Communists, not because Sen. Joseph McCarthy was wrong, but because he proved a poor spokesperson for the cause. He was easily criticized for his bombast, but the declassification of the Venona papers, secret communications between Soviet spymasters and their agents, revealed he may well have underestimated the threat.

Later, the Russian Federation declassified former Soviet spy agency records that further confirmed that many Americans, dedicated Communists, were working to undermine our government.

The price America paid in part for the Great Depression of the 1930s was the undermining of faith in the Capitalist system among many Americans.

Unions arose, not just in response to worker grievances, but also because their leaders were frequently sympathetic to Communism. The FDR and subsequent administrations introduced Social Security and Medicare, tapping into the fears of those who had experienced the Depression with programs that vastly expanded the federal government, characterizing them as the ultimate “safety net.” Then Congress plundered the trusts that were supposed to fund both programs. Both programs are insolvent.

A recent study by Paul Hollander, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, was published by Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty & Prosperity. It is titled, “Reflections on Communism: Twenty Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall.”

The celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall earlier this year was attended by many world leaders with the notable exception of President Barack Obama. For a man who has visited more foreign nations in his first year in office than any previous President, the decision to avoid this significant anniversary was taken as one more signal of his true political and economic agenda.

We know that he was greatly influenced by Marxists or people who viewed Communism sympathetically, not the least of which were his grandparents who introduced him to a mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA.

Obama wrote that he was drawn to Marxists among his teachers in college. He began his political career in the home of former Weatherman Bill Ayers. These days he is praised by Communists in Cuba and Venezuela. He sided with a Leftist former president of Honduras who tried to illegally alter its constitution. The Hondurans had the courage to cast him out.

The specter of Communist subversion of the U.S. Constitution is staring us in the eye with the so-called healthcare “reform” of Medicare; it includes all manner of provisions that are unconstitutional and would expand federal government control over one-sixth of the nation’s economy. The bribery and thuggish pressures and threats against Democrat Senators and Representatives to pass the bill reveal a political leadership more devoted to ideology than the will of the People.

Specifically, President Obama’s drive for a single payer system is the direct result of the influence of Dr. Quentin Young, a retired physician with a long history of commitment to Communism. In 1995, Dr. Quentin was among those who met in the Hyde Park home of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn to launch Obama’s political career.

As Prof. Hollander points out in his study, “Not only individual intellectuals but entire professional associations have expressed favorable attitudes toward communist systems” citing the Latin American Studies Association that has “repeatedly taken positions supportive of Castro’s Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua.” In 1990, the Organization of American Historians defeated a motion that expressed regret that the organization “never protested the forced betrayal of the historian’s responsibility to truth imposed upon Soviet and East European historians by their political leaders.”

The recent United Nations’ Climate Change Conference refused to take notice of the revelations that the data on which the “global warming” theory is based was falsified by a handful of meteorologists and climatologists in an effort to impose a global governing system. The interim first Secretary General of the UN was Alger Hiss, an American and secret Soviet agent

It did not escape notice that Venezuela’s communist dictator, Hugo Chavez, received a rousing ovation when he spoke at the conference or that President Obama continues to repeat the lies surrounding the discredited “global warming” fraud.

Virtually the entire agenda of American environmental organizations has been focused on an attack on private property rights and denying Americans access to their vast reserves of energy in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas, thus undermining U.S. growth and prosperity.

Unlike Prof. Hollander who escaped Hungary following the crushing of the 1956 revolution by Soviet forces, “Western intellectuals who remain attracted to communist ideals never had the disillusioning experience of living in an actual communist or socialist society.”

Among them we must number much of the nation’s media that has been a party to political and environmental deceptions, and the Hollywood community that has produced many films to influence public opinion about the earlier efforts to address Communist activities and later Green issues with a very Red agenda.

The Medicare “reform” expands “socialism” in America, but it is an example of naked Communism at work. It is a bill put together behind closed doors and so extensive its control of the lives of Americans literally determines who lives and who dies. It will wreck the best healthcare system in the world albeit one that has its flaws.

It is authoritarianism at work, the kind we associate with regimes in Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and everywhere else Communism has been imposed on captive nations.

Healthcare “reform” is not about uninsured Americans. It is not “socialism.” It is Communism, effectively putting the entire nation’s healthcare system under state control. It must be defeated just as past generations of Americans knew the threat of Communism and devoted the nation’s treasure and even their lives to defeat it.

Obama: Getting It Wrong

By Alan Caruba

Consider this. Germany’s voters have turned away from socialism. So have Italy’s. The French elected a president who defeated a socialist opponent.

The British are about to rid themselves of the Labour Party, a proponent of socialism. Even China, while still governed by its communist party, has embraced capitalism and, in doing so, is on its way to become a real world power.

And America has elected the most leftist President in its history whose support comes from the far left elements of the Democrat Party. It should be said, however, that many Americans had grown tired and angry at the Republican Party for its failure to follow through on its conservative agenda, while other voters embraced the candidate, but not liberalism.

The result is that all Americans are literally under siege by a handful of Democrats in Congress that have been on a drunken borrowing and spending splurge, want to impose a huge tax on all energy use, and to “fix” an insolvent Medicare system by adding even more people to it while claiming to rid it of “waste and fraud” that no administration since its beginning has ever achieved.

What is wrong with this picture?

In a Saturday Night Live skit, an Obama impersonator asks the audience what he has accomplished since taking office and answers the question proudly saying “Nothing!”

Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, former professor of history, says this is a teaching moment. Americans have discovered that a great smile and a powerful oratorical style (so long as the TelePrompters are working) is not a substitute for having a real plan as opposed to a head full of mushy socialist theory.

The likelihood is that President Obama has a better idea about what he will have for breakfast tomorrow morning than what he will do about America’s long involvement in Afghanistan. The irony is that, if he does get out, it will be conservatives, mindful of the Vietnam debacle, who will applaud the decision.

One hopes the CIA has shown him maps of Iran where all the known nuclear weapons sites are located. It isn’t that much of a secret. You can Google them. The real question is whether President Obama has the guts to do what every single person in the Middle East wants America to do. Bomb those sites. The President is hoping tiny Israel will do it for us.

He was not elected to make easy decisions.

He was not elected to fly around the world apologizing for America.

He was not elected to bow to the Saudi king.

Did you hear a single word out of him in the past two weeks regarding the arrest of three separate Muslims under suspicion of planning terrorist acts here? No. But he did not hesitate to characterize the arrest of an obstreperous black Harvard professor as “stupid.”

For all the torrent of criticism leveled against his predecessor, Americans slept peacefully in their beds for eight years, unafraid of a repeat of 9/11.

This President, though, wants to reduce the size of the military at the same time his Party has tacked over a billion dollars in “earmarks” the Pentagon does not want in the defense budget.

This President generated “tea parties” all over the nation within months of taking office and a huge protest rally in Washington, D.C. on September 12.

It is hard to think of a president who has gotten more things wrong in such a short period of time.

This cascade of failures, this effort to turn America into a socialist nation, this indifference to public protest can only lead to worsening conditions and events.

Teaching U.S. Kids the U.N. Way

By Alan Caruba

It’s horrible enough to think of the way school children have been deliberately and unnecessarily frightened by the teaching in American schools about “global warming.” Since the 1980s it has been part of the curriculum in schools throughout the nation, convincing a lot of children that the Earth was doomed.

It was difficult enough to grow up as I did knowing that the Soviet Union could annihilate most of the population with nuclear missiles or that their brand of communism could destroy the liberties Americans take for granted.

Ever since Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education, the nation’s educational systems, once among the best in the world and answering directly to local school boards, have produced a dismal record of general failure to teach the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic. It was taken over by the National Education Association, a union, and a curriculum of liberalism has existed ever since.

American children grew up learning that the Founding Fathers were slave owners. They were forced to learn “fuzzy math” and “whole words”, two systems that left them unable to add or subtract sums without a calculator in hand and to read without some difficulty.

Schools became increasingly dangerous places, often requiring the fulltime presence of a police officer. In sum, schools, i.e. administrators and faculty, increasingly sought to place themselves between the student and his parents as the primary authority.

Now we learn that the Obama administration is imposing “education reform efforts” that will adopt “internationally benchmarked education standards.” They will become national standards. The incentive will be federal “stimulus” dollars. There’s more to learn about this at http://www.edwatch.org/,

It’s worth keeping in mind that “No Child Left Behind” is widely regarded as a failure and that all children do not learn at the same rate. Albert Einstein was deemed a dimwit because, for his first years, he did not speak much to anyone. NCLB became a “teach to the test” monstrosity that eliminated any creativity from the teaching process and produced results that, along with previous “reforms” left American students ranked way behind many other nations.

Instead of expecting children whose first language was Spanish or some other to learn English, bilingual education was introduced at considerable expense that ensures those most in need of learning English would have one more obstacle to overcome. Then schools were saddled with mandates for “special” students with disabilities who often cost local school boards hundreds of thousands of dollars to meet their needs.

What this indoctrination is all about is “a de facto federal curriculum” that will financially reward states that adopt what the DOE wants taught. Here’s where it really gets ugly. As Allen Quist of EdWatch points out, the curriculum will be “internationally benchmarked” which is a way of saying American educational standards will be determined by UNESCO, the United Nations education arm.

In practice this means children will be taught about the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but might not get much or any instruction regarding the U.S. Constitution. As Quist puts it, “American schools used to teach the fundamentals of the United States, including the inalienable, God-given rights of life, liberty and property, as guaranteed by our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Not any more. Our children will be taught that they only have those rights the UN says they have.”

Then, for good measure, throw in the UN’s Earth Charter which includes the “promotion of the equitable distribution of wealth within nations and among nations.” It also endorses nuclear disarmament, gay marriage, legalized abortion, and a general curriculum of flat out Earth worship.

The UN is unquestionably the most corrupt international institution on the face of the Earth. President Obama has just ensured future generations of American students will be indoctrinated with its belief system instead of the one our Founding Fathers gave us.

Is it any wonder that home schooling has become such a fast-growing trends among parents who do not want to turn their children over to a system that denigrates American values?

If you think this nation is being sabotaged by the White House, add education to the list of its handiwork.