America's Communist President

By Alan Caruba

In his extraordinary book, “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century”, the historian, Dr. Paul Kengor, stated in his introduction that “We now know that American Communists and their masters in Moscow were acutely aware that they could never gain the popular support they needed to enlist the support of a much wider coalition that could help them push their private agenda.”

Most threatening, however, was Dr. Kengor’s discovery that “it was nothing short of stunning to research this book during the presidential bid of Barack Obama and hear so many of the names in my research surface repeatedly in the background of the man who became president of the United States of America. The way in which so many names and themes from the Cold War past aligned and made their way into Obama’s orbit was chilling.”

Obama’s December 8th speech in Osawatomie, Kansas revealed to anyone paying any attention that the President is a Communist. Speaking of the nation’s economic system that has created the greatest wealth for the most people anywhere, Capitalism, Obama said, “It doesn’t work. It has never worked.”

No one would argue that capitalism is “fair”, nor would they argue that life is “fair.” These are things that never were and never will be, but Obama’s reelection campaign theme will be that Americans are suffering because of Capitalism, because of a lack of fairness.

In a December 8 Washington Times commentary, Jeffrey T. Kuhner wrote, “There is only one problem with the White House’s narrative: It’s completely false. Mr. Obama is not a defender of the middle class but has been its mortal enemy. His policies have impoverished working-and-middle-class Americans.”

Other than the utterly brain-dead liberals for whom facts are meaningless, most Americans understand, as Kuhner pointed out, “His massive stimulus failed to restore economic recovery…his trillion-dollar deficits and skyrocketing debt have mortgaged the future of our children…Obamacare suffocates businesses, stifles job creation, and adds another unsustainable entitlement. It is creeping socialized medicine, which is wrecking the world’s finest health care system.”

Rush Limbaugh denounced the speech as “alien to American ideals and principles…your vision for this country is not rooted in any—not one—American tradition.”

Obama’s history, what is known of it given his extensive efforts to hide the facts that are usually available about a candidate or president, is testimony to the fact that he is a Communist and the only reason this remains clouded to many Americans has been the shameful failure of the Fourth Estate, the liberal mainstream media, to expose it.

He remains in office due to the failure of both the media and the Republican Party to cite the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against anyone holding the office who is not a “natural-born” American. Obama’s father was a Kenyan, a subject of Great Britain. He should not have been on the Democratic Party ballot and he should not be in the Oval Office as this is written.

Many of the known facts about Obama were published in Dr. Jerome Corsi’s 2008 book, “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality.” Thirty-five pages of footnotes citing the documentation of the facts cited were there for anyone to read. Obama was born into a family of Leftists. As a youngster he was mentored by Frank Marshal Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA.

Of his early college years, Obama said in his memoir that at Occidental, “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 and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”

Obama’s political career began with a fund-raiser in the living room of two dedicated, self-identified Communists, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. As Dr. Corsi pointed out, “The problem is that Obama sought out his relationships with the Alinski organization, the Ayers-Dohrn radicals, the scandal-ridden (Antoin ‘Tony’) Rezko, Reverand (Jeremiah) Wright and black-liberation theology, and Farrakhan and the Black Muslims. At the time he wanted these ties.” In the course of his 2008 campaign he rejected all efforts to tie him to these individuals.

The appointment of the many “czars” to oversee and guide the actions of government departments and agencies became the subject, first of ridicule, followed by the realization he was infiltrating the government with known radicals of different stripes. The one that quickly gained attention was Van Jones, an avowed Communist. When that became known, Jones resigned.

The Osawatomie speech was classic Obama. In the past he has sought to align himself with former presidents and this time around it was Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive. As Americans have sought to peel away the many layers of deceit surrounding Obama, the single abiding factor in his life is Communism. The views he expressed were a combination of class warfare and an attack on Capitalism.

In 2008 Americans, reeling from the financial crisis that all too conveniently began in the final months of the Bush43 presidency, were duped into believing that a man with nothing more than a message of “hope and change” was a messiah that would lead the nation out of its problems.

Obama was and is the first Communist President of the United States of America. We have a President who rails against “millionaires and billionaires”, corporations, Wall Street, and all other aspects of our Capitalist economy.

We have a President and a Democratic Party that have tipped their hat to the Occupy Wall Street radicals.

We have a President and a Democratic Party totally aligned with the unions in America, some of which put the auto industry in jeopardy, others in the public sector that have plundered state treasuries with sweetheart deals for pensions and health plans, and who we have seen thuggishly oppose the restructuring of collective bargaining. It is why a close ally of Obama, Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union (SIEU), praised the Chinese Communist economic model in a December 1 Wall Street Journal article.

And we now have a President who says Capitalism “doesn’t work” and “It has never worked.” That is utterly absurd, but it reveals his ideology and his goal of fomenting a Communist revolution in America by bankrupting the nation to achieve it.

Obama is a horrid aberration, the result of a combination of the Democratic Party, the liberal media, and the education community to dumb down Americans and make them ready for the Communist America that Obama advocates.

Communism did not die with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is alive and well in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam and in Venezuela. The soft form, Socialism, has brought a number of European nations to ruin and threatens the U.S.

In 2010 Americans returned power in the House of Representatives to the Republican Party. We must finish the job in the Senate and in the White House in 2012. If we do not, the America we love will perish.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Spending More has Never Worked!

By Alan Caruba

Ask any financial advisor what to do when you are drowning in debt and they will tell you to spend less and pay down your debt. This is just common sense. However, if you ask politicians what to do, they will advise that the nation spend more and borrow more.

Despite a huge national debt and deficit, the federal government just concluded its biggest spending year with its second biggest annual budget deficit. For fiscal 2011 which ended September 30, the government spent $3.6 trillion, an increase over the $3.52 trillion posted in 2009.

The budget “deficit” is the difference between the revenues that government took in and what it spent. The “debt” is the accumulation of yearly deficits. The U.S. has a debt of $15 trillion and this grows by billions daily due to the interest that must be paid on the amount of borrowing required to sustain its operations. Fully 40 cents of every dollar the government spends is now borrowed.

The Congressional Budget Office noted that the deficit is “greater than in any year since 1945” as World War Two wound down. As a Wall Street Journal editorial expressed it, “The Obama years have racked up the three largest deficits, both in absolute amounts and as a share of GDP, since Hitler still terrorized Europe.”

In the wake of the failed Super Committee, charged with cutting a mere $1.2 trillion over ten years, the editorial noted that “President Obama fiercely resisted even the token spending cuts for fiscal 2011 pressed by House Republicans earlier this year.” He continues to press for higher taxes on “the rich” despite the fact that the rich pay the lion’s share of income taxes already. By Obama’s definition, the rich is anyone earning more than $200,000 a year. By most definitions, that qualifies as middle class, not rich.

We are entering a period that is likely to be called something like the Great Depression Two or 2.0. History usually serves as a guide and, as Hans Bader, counsel of special projects for the Competitive Enterprise Institute has noted, “government spending (and budget deficits) rose dramatically in the Depression under both the Hoover and the Roosevelt administration…(both) increased, rather than cut, spending in the Great Depression.”

It is a dangerous thing to cling to myths about the Great Depression. Bader says “Big government liberalism is a religion, not a school of rational thought. A false understanding of the history of the Great Depression is the cornerstone of left-wing ideology…”

The Great Depression was a series of recessions. In the August 5 New York Times, Bader noted that “In 1937, the Supreme Court upheld anti-business legislation that had been struck down by lower courts, like the National Labor Relations Act, in decisions like National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. That made unions more powerful, led to a wave of costly strikes and discouraged hiring. The increased wages demanded by unions resulted in employers laying off many workers.”

Does this sound familiar? Efforts by States to rid themselves of collective bargaining, primarily with civil service unions such as Service Employees International Union (SEIU), is a reflection of the way they have drained public coffers with wage, pension and health plans that exceed those of private enterprise. Andy Stern, the former SEIU president, just had a commentary published in The Wall Street Journal in which he urged the U.S. to adopt Chinese Communism!

In Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere, unions representing government workers and others in the private sector have spent millions to defeat such efforts to end collective bargaining. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie gained national attention for his efforts to curb that state’s teacher’s union demands.

What President Obama calls a “do nothing Congress” is one in which his party controlled both houses of Congress until the 2010 elections. It will live in infamy for imposing Obamacare on a nation that has flatly rejected it.

The Supreme Court will hear the suit brought against it by 26 state attorney generals. If permitted to stand, it will destroy what is widely regarded as the world’s best health system along with the historic interpretation of the Constitution’s commerce clause.

As for spending programs, President Obama’s “stimulus” or his “green jobs” program have been a costly failure along with the administration’s waste of billions in loan guarantees to green industries. Worst of all the administration’s thwarting of the nation’s traditional energy industries, as recently seen in the delay of the Keystone XL pipeline, has cost thousands of existing and future jobs.

It is a “perfect storm” of historic and current errors in judgment concerning the nation’s economy. Americans can only hope that Europe’s financial community does not implode before the November 2012 elections, dragging the U.S. and the rest of the world into another Great Depression.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Occupy Wall Street: Communism's Clueless Foot Soldiers

By Alan Caruba

Norman Thomas, a U.S. Socialist Party candidate for president, once famously said, “The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But, under the name of ‘liberalism’, they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Thomas ran for president six consecutive times from 1928. He needn’t have bothered as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and subsequent Democrat Presidents introduced most of the planks of the Communist Manifesto and we live with them to this day.

The Occupy Wall Street youngsters are the latest foot soldiers of Communism, though it is likely most are too ignorant to realize it. They have been so thoroughly indoctrinated in government schools and by Hollywood and the media that they have no idea how they are being used by labor unions and other leftist organizations.

The protesters are likely unaware of the misery and murders Marx’s Communism imposed on Russia courtesy of Lenin, Stalin, and those who followed in their footsteps. Mao's Red China murdered thousands as well in the pursuit of the “equality” that is the alleged goal of Communism and liberalism.

In 1848, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote “The Communist Manifesto.” Marx never held a job in his life, living off of donations from Engels and others. He failed miserably at every enterprise he tried, including publishing newspapers.

The Manifesto had ten planks. The first was the abolition of property in land and the application of all rents to public purposes. Anyone who owns land in America for their homes or any activity such as farming or mining knows that they must pay fees to various levels of government. Even in death, inheritance taxes are a penalty imposed on passing property to one’s children. These taxes were the subject of the Manifesto’s third plank which called for the abolition of all rights of inheritance.

The second plank is one that is very much in the news. It is a heavy progressive or graduated income tax. Everyone pays income taxes and there are demands that “millionaires and billionaires” pay more than others. Corporate income taxes in the U.S. are among the highest in the world. In the Supreme Court decision, McCulloch v Maryland Webster, Chief Justice John Marshall said that the power to tax is the power to destroy. Too much taxation is one of the reasons the nation finds itself in its current financial crisis as it is directly connected to whether people will invest in new businesses or existing ones and destroys job creation.

The Manifesto called for the centralization of all means of communication and transportation in the hands of the state and the U.S. government is replete with commissions that achieve this goal. The fifth plank called for the centralization of credit in the hands of the state and, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Federal Reserve, a system of privately owned banks that have a monopoly on the creation of money backed solely by the credit of the government. Standard & Poors recently downgraded the nation’s credit rating. Is there really any gold in Fort Knox? One hopes.

Most famously the Manifesto called for the state to own all factories and instruments of production. Instead of merely permitting the standard practice of bankruptcy to occur so that they could be restructured, the Obama administration stepped in and “bailed out”, i.e. took ownership of General Motors and Chrysler companies. Creditors were kicked to the curb.

The Manifesto called for government control of all labor and agriculture. The federal government has a matrix of departments that exercise control of these sectors of the economy; a Department of Labor and a Department of Agriculture.

The tenth plank of the Manifesto called for “free education for all children in public schools and the combination of education with industrial production.” The Occupy Wall Street protesters are the result of government schools whose purpose is to create a docile work force that, along with various government “entitlement” programs provides for a cradle-to-grave submissive workforce.

But the Occupy Wall Street protesters, you say, hardly seem submission, nor do the unions that we’ve seen occupy the state house in Wisconsin, call for strikes, and other forms of worker protests. Intimidation in the quest for the Manifesto's objectives is a Communist tactic.

The protesters are calling for free college educations. The unions were protesting against the loss of collective bargaining with governments that determine their pension and health benefits, all paid for with public funding.

Little wonder the protesters are being embraced by the Democratic Party and unions, and that those spoiled brats befouling the walkways, streets, and alleys of New York and other cities are totally oblivious to the way they are being used.

Americans better insist that Capitalism emerges stronger from this latest spate of organized anarchy. If not, Karl Marx and the foolish liberals will succeed in destroying what is left of the nation.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Harm a President Can Do

By Alan Caruba

The announcement that Barack Hussein Obama will run for reelection was greeted with little fanfare and less surprise. In order to raise money, he needed to make it official and he was quick to join Rev. Al Sharpton, a man with a dubious history of histrionics, at a Harlem event.

Even with the data available, two years into his first term, it is difficult to grasp how much harm he has done to the nation as its elected leader.

Despite the fact that, until November 2010, the Congress was controlled by the Democrats, he was so busy during his second year that he could not find time to present Congress with a budget. The government shutdown is pure political theatre and should be avoided. If it comes, it will be the result of a political calculation that the President can benefit from it.

Obamacare, the hallmark of his political legacy, is opposed by 26 U.S. States and has been declared unconstitutional in a federal court. The House has voted to repeal it. Hardly a week goes by without finding billions in new costs buried within its pages, all of which expand the size of government beyond imagination.

In two years, the nation has accumulated debt at a rate more than 27 times as fast as its entire prior history since the day George Washington took office. In January 2009, when President Obama was sworn into office, the national debt was $10.627 trillion. Today it is $14.052 trillion and rising.

The leadership that the world has long looked to America to provide has dissipated. The nations of the West, in particular the European socialist nations, have also spent themselves into penury. Portugal is the latest to cry out for help. Greece, Ireland, Spain, all once among the great powers, have drained their coffers with cradle-to-grave assurances that the government would always pick up the tab.

After two years in which every regulatory obstacle, including an illegal “moratorium” on deep water drilling for oil was imposed, the price of West Texas crude oil went from $38.74 a barrel to $99.02. Other commodities, soybeans, sugar, and corn have all seen similar increases. The price of corn has more than doubled in just twelve months.

America has enormous reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas. It has long been a giant agricultural economy, but all this potential wealth is being throttled by men and women in the Obama administration who think Americans must be forced to change their driving and eating habits. In a consumer-driven economy, they want Americans to consume less.

When President Obama was sworn in, there were 2,600,000 long-term unemployed. Today there are 9,193,000 Americans in that category. People living in poverty in America have, in just two year’s time, gone from 39,800,000 to 43,600,000. This occurred during a time when massive “bailouts” were undertaken by the government. They are now widely regarded as failures.

The greatest automotive manufacturer in the world, General Motors, is for all intents and purposes owned by the government. Auto union jobs had to be saved even if taxpayers had to have their taxes diverted for that purpose. Having brought the company to ruin with outrageous work, wage, health, and pension demands, they were still to be rewarded by the Obama administration. The heads of public service unions, among the largest in the nations, have enjoyed an open-door policy at the White House.

Having been elected by campaigning against the war in Iraq, President Obama expanded the number of troops in Afghanistan. While U.S. troop presence in Iraq was being reduced, the President suddenly engaged the nation militarily in Libya without any authorization from Congress.

With one glaring exception, no cohesive foreign policy regarding the Middle East exists. Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East, an ally of the United States, surrounded on all sides by enemies and threatened daily by Iran, has been abandoned.

Egypt’s Mubarack was publicly abandoned, but Iran’s Ahmadinejad’s stolen election evoked no response when people took to the streets in Tehran to protest it. Col. Gadhafi remains in control of Libya. Syria’s dictator was called “a reformer.”

Domestically, the President calls for windmills to produce energy when they remain one of the least practical means, sustained solely by government subsidies and mandates. The factory in which he made the call belongs to a Spanish company. His call for solar energy is equally fatuous. High speed rail is yet another foolish initiative.

The last two years have been testimony to the harm a President can do to a nation and yet, despite the obvious harm being imposed on millions of Americans, the President continues to enjoy the support of people for whom the growth of the government, the increase in spending, and the nation’s loss of leadership in the world is not understood and will not be until it is too late to reverse the damage.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Unions: Dupes, Thugs, and Politicians

By Alan Caruba

Growing up in New Jersey and having been a journalist here, my memory of news about unions in the Garden and Empire States is that of headlines concerning the indictment and sentencing of various union chiefs and their underlings.

The alignment between unions and the Mafia is so well known it has been the subject of movies such as “On the Waterfront”, “The Godfather”, “Goodfellas” and “Casino.” To this day the rumor persists that Jimmy Hoffa is buried somewhere between the goalposts of Giants stadium in the Meadowlands.

As events unfold in the very progressive capital of Wisconsin, Madison, the public is being treated to the way unions have very nearly always functioned. Intimidation has been their stock in trade with campaign contributions running a close second. We are watching an epic battle between Wisconsin voters and entrenched, self-serving unions.

In his 2006 book, “Solidarity for Sale: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America’s Promise”, Robert Finch, a former labor organizer and later a faculty member at Cornell and New York University, told the story of how and why unions were and are rotten to the core.

Finch’s book reads like a Hollywood movie script, replete with the names of Mafia families like that of New Jersey’s Vito Genevese and a host of others throughout the nation.

“Corruption,” says Finch “had been built into the labor movement from its very inception.” The politicians who benefited from union support have always done their best to ignore “five generations of racketeering, Mafia rule, bribery and extortion, job selling, benefit fund theft, and simple thievery, going back to the days of the early-twentieth-century labor czars.” This dates back as well to the creation of the National Labor Relations Board created by Congress in 1935. It is another legacy of the FDR years that have left the nation on the brink of bankruptcy.

Suffice to say that the National Labor Relations Board is a useless, allegedly “independent” government entity, often looking with favor on the union’s unceasing demands. Among the issues conservatives want to thwart are card check regulations to enhance union power. Reportedly, Republicans have cut $50 million from the NRLB’s budget as a part of the effort to cut the bloated Obama budget.

Finch notes that “In 1986, the President’s Commission on Organized Crime had identified the four most mobbed-up unions; the Teamsters, the Laborers, the Hotel and Restaurant Workers, and the East Coast Longshoremen. The close relationship between labor unions and the Democratic Party is too often obscured by the mainstream media. “According to the Center for Responsible Politics”, Finch noted, “seven of the top ten campaign contributors in the last decade are not Fortune 500 corporations. They’re AFL-CIO unions.”

Little wonder that public service union members are howling for the head of Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker or that several Wisconsin Democrat politicians have fled to Illinois to avoid debating his proposals. His demand that unions forego collective bargaining rights is, in fact, not that unusual. Twenty-two States have curbed union power with “right to work” legislation.

Perhaps the greatest error regarding the union movement came in 1962 when President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order to grant all federal government employees the right to unionize and collectively bargain with departments and agencies. This accounts for the rise in power of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) with its 1.8 million members and the deceptively named National Education Association (NEA), a union, the largest in the nation. It has 3.2 million members and employs more than 550 staff.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the NEA is responsible for the horrid test scores of U.S. students throughout the nation despite their incessant demands for higher wages, along with healthcare and pension programs well in excess of the private sector. Since the 1960s, they have been at the heart of the deteriorating condition of education in America. A four-part series on this topic is posted on the website of The National Anxiety Center which I founded in 1990.

Leading the SEIU is Andy Stern whose many visits to the White House since Obama was elected have become legendary. His rise in the union began with organizing hundreds of thousands of home care and day care workers. Despite unionizing, their pay has never really improved. “The SEIU,” Finch noted, “is now the largest AFL-CIO union.”

During his campaign and since, President Obama has never made any secret of how beholden he is to the SEIU and the union movement that contributed millions toward his election. It should come as no surprise that he has spoken up regarding the Wisconsin riots on the side of the union members. This ignores the fact that a majority of Wisconsin voters put the Governor in office, along with giving political power to Republicans there. They campaigned on the very issues the unions are protesting against.

Wisconsin, like other States that are essentially broke, must win the struggle to reduce the taxpayer burden that government worker and public sector unions represent.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Murdering America

By Alan Caruba

We are all witnesses to the crime; the deliberate murder of the United States of America.

In just under a year and a half, the White House in collusion with the Democrats in Congress has conspired not to “save” America from a financial crisis they created, but to kill America through a series of multi-billion dollar “bailouts” that have two things in common. (1) They did not work and (2) they have created levels of national debt beyond anything in the entire previous history of the nation.

Seen in this light, they are a brilliant game plan for destroying what was once the greatest economy in the world. It was based entirely on capitalist principles of free market competition, constant innovation, and entrepreneurial enterprise. Tied now as we are to the economies of other nations, there’s not much good news of late.

The Obama administration has imposed the takeover of one sixth of the nation’s economy through its so-called health care “reform” and there are already revelations that it will not save money, but cost much more. It will deprive Americans of the right to make decisions with their physicians regarding all manner of treatment, some of which will literally determine life or death. It will reduce options for medical care as physicians, particularly in private practice, close their doors.

Writing in the June issue of Health Care News, John C. Goodman said, “Despite assurances, the Medicaid expansion included in the health care legislation signed by President Barack Obama is not another unfunded mandate foisted on the states, many states will find their budgets bloated with new Medicaid spending.” Goodman is CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis. It defied credibility that millions could be added to Medicare and Medicaid roles without raising the costs of these programs. In the end, Obamacare was forced upon Americans, the majority of whom opposed it and still do.

Among the priorities of a new Congress, in the event that power passes to the Republican Party, is the repeal of Obamacare.

The new financial “reforms” need to be rolled back as they too place limits on Wall Street that found itself victimized by the fact that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two “government sponsored entities” are directly responsible for the housing bubble. It is insane that the federal government should hold the majority of mortgage loans. Yet the “reforms” just passed make no mention of either agency!

The Cap-and-Trade Act, renamed a “climate” bill and awaiting a vote in the Senate, would raise the cost of all energy use in the nation and literally destroy the economy. Likewise, the effort of the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide would have the same effect.

Another priority is to take General Motors off life-support for the unions that destroyed it through their salary, healthcare and pension demands. Here again, the federal government has no rational justification for such ownership. The most recent proposed bailout at a cost of $165 billion is yet another bailout for union pensions and this, too, is not a responsibility of American taxpayers.

There was a time in the nation’s history when unions were needed, but now they are largely parasitic, draining the treasuries of the federal and state governments, and no where is this more obvious than in the Service Employees International Union. Obama is so closely allied with SEIU that one wonders why so little attention was paid during the 2008 campaign. This union alone is alleged to have spent as much as $60 million to secure his election.

There are other government worker’s unions such as the teacher’s unions that exert political power in money, campaign manpower, and votes. The teacher’s unions have largely failed their mission to impart the most basic skills, leaving American students behind their counterparts in other nations. Their health and pension benefits, well in excess of the private sector, are a massive drain on the public treasuries of state governments.

There are only two protections left to Americans, the courts and the ballot box. The courts appear to moving far too slowly on the issue of constitutionality regarding Obamacare and, in particular, Barack Obama’s eligibility to be President.

All this demonstrates an astounding lack of power that has always being attributed to Wall Street and to corporations in general. Environmental opponents popularly refer to them as Big Oil, Big Coal, or Big Pharma. They appear to have no power against an aggressively Marxist President, his administration, and a Congress dominated by progressives.

On May 22nd, Rasmussen Reports revealed that 72% of likely voters say they are not confident that Congress knows what it’s doing as regards the economy. There has been little change in this opinion since September 2008.

The voters, however, have demonstrated their power in the election of a Republican as Senator from Massachusetts and two Republican Governors in formerly Blue States. The primaries are demonstrating that the only way to win is to be anti-Obama and the best way to lose is to be an incumbent participating in the destruction of the nation.

The current national state of mind is understandably one of growing fears and it should be in the face of the determined effort to destroy America.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

A Whiff of Revolution

By Alan Caruba

After a long series of taxes and arrogant acts that could not fail to anger the citizens of Boston, Massachusetts and nearby colonists affected by them, the American colonists finally picked up their guns and fired on the British coming to seize their store of munitions in Concord and Lexington.

The American Revolution did not occur in a week, a month or a year. It came after a Navigation Act, a Stamp Act, and others called the Intolerable Acts that actually closed Boston Harbor in retaliation for the famous Boston Tea Party.

By then the British had dispatched troops to Massachusetts to put some muscle behind their demands that the colonies help pay for the deep debt the King and Parliament had incurred from England’s many wars on the continent.

America was their nation in spirit long before it was organized as one. Americans were not going to be pushed around. They had tried everything they could to make their case, but finally there was nothing left but to unite and throw off the tyranny.

In 1770, the Boston massacre had inflamed public sentiment, but it would not be until 1774 that the citizens of Lexington and Concord would take up arms. In 1776, the second Continental Congress would convene in Philadelphia and sign a Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson wrote, “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”

It has taken a brief year and a half for President Obama and his Democrat-controlled Congress to enflame the anger of a broad spectrum of Americans, Democrats, Republicans, and independents, who have been rallying in Washington, D.C., and in towns and cities across the nation against a healthcare “reform” they overwhelmingly opposed, but which became law.

Since then, twenty States have joined together to nullify it, challenging it in the courts while some passed laws to protect their citizens against it. This is very much in the spirit of the Tenth Amendment that posits powers in the States and in the People that are not specific to the federal government. America is a republic composed of separate and distinct republics.

The initial seizure of General Motors raised questions of its constitutionality that have never been answered. Rather than standard bankruptcy proceedings, stockholders and creditors were shoved aside to grant control to the very unions that had brought the iconic auto company to its knees.

This has since been followed by open threats to Wall Street that include proposals that would allow the government to seize firms, toss out their board of directors and officers, and, in effect, nationalize them. This is not unlike the dictatorship of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

It is the antithesis of a nation of laws, a republic; a democracy where power is situated in the people and the constitution limits the powers of the executive and the legislative branches that are, in turn, subject to the judicial process.

If, between now and the midterm elections, the President and Congress pass the Cap-and-Trade Act and an amnesty for illegal aliens, I suspect that some Americans may not be content to sit by while States and the courts work their way within the Constitution. They will sense—and rightfully so—a despotism never before associated with the presidency.

There is a whiff of revolution in the air and that is why the White House and Far Left are leveling the bogus charge that the Tea Partiers are all violent neo-Nazi types. It is not beyond this White House to deliberately provoke violence. There have already been isolated incidents of Tea Partiers being attacked by union goons.

Since the White House operates on the basis of one questionable “crisis” to another to impose unwanted laws, nothing can be ruled out by these community organizers.

One thing is clear. We have a very unpopular president.

We have had others in the past. Lyndon B. Johnson chose not to run again after his first and only full term. Jimmy Carter was a one-term president. Richard Nixon was forced to resign. Even George W. Bush, after two terms, had worn out his welcome.

It has not been uncommon to characterize unpopular presidents as despots, but Obama is different.

He exudes arrogance.

He offends our nation’s allies and is seen as weak by our enemies.

He’s declared war on our vital energy sector and now on Wall Street.

He imposed a healthcare reform that will drive up costs and cause millions to lose the insurance coverage their employers provide.

Add to this the growing legion of unemployed.

There’s a lot of anger in America today.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

One Picture's Worth a Couple of Billion!

Killing Corporate America

By Alan Caruba

All those morons who are forever going on about the evil corporations never notice that it is corporations, great and small, that employ millions of Americans and the best of them do everything they can to ensure their workers are happy, if for no other reason than that it increases productivity. People don’t work just for money. They work for a sense of dignity and self-worth.

The Obama administration appears to be intent on destroying or driving out one corporation after another by any means possible. This amounts to punishing success and crushing it in the meat-grinder of government regulation. The latest victim is Fedex.

A June 9 Washington Times editorial noted that, “Led by Rep. James L. Oberstar, Minnesota Democrat, the House on May 21 passed legislation that contains an almost hidden provision—a mere 230 words—that would hobble FedEx Express. It would do so by completely changing the labor laws under which the company operates.”

“A mere dozen or so workers in just one city could hamstring much of the nation’s overnight delivery service.” The difference between FedEx and United Parcel Service (UPS) is that UPS is unionized. As such it is governed by the National Labor Relations Act, the terms of which “favor unions such as the Teamsters (and) both have an interest in kneecapping FedEx Express.”

The fact is, however, FedEx Express ships 85 percent of its goods by air. UPS moves 85 percent of its goods by truck.

This means that Americans who are accustomed to overnight delivery face the prospect of losing that remarkable service and, if they are looking to the U.S. Postal Service to provide it, they can forget about it because the USPS contracts with FedEx to carry almost all of its Express Mail and a significant portion of its Priority Mail.

The bad news doesn’t stop there. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that the Postal Service has announced that, by October 1, it will decide whether to close or consolidate 3,100 post offices and retail outlets out of 36,700. It is also contemplating eliminating “tens of thousands” of jobs from its work force of 636,000.

The Postal Service, in every respect a government entity, lost nearly $2 billion in the three months that ended March 31. Mail volume is down nearly 15 percent from the previous year.

I wonder why? Could it have anything to do with email? Could it have anything to do with a 42-cent First Class stamp for a service that hasn’t essentially changed since the post office was first organized by Benjamin Franklin?

Now consider what happens if FedEx, the private corporation that moves most of the USPS Express and Priority mail is forced out of business in order to ensure that some useless union can cripple its operation? Who will move your mail swiftly then? Not USPS and not UPS.

This is what your government is doing to you and to the nation.

This is your government that currently owns General Motors in partnership with the United Auto Workers and to hell with the bondholders who lent it money in the belief that they would be first in line to get their money if it went bankrupt. Their contract said so, but a gangster government has little interest in honoring the sanctity of contracts. The new GM ads say it is “leaner and greener” which is another way of saying “smaller and slower.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft Corporation’s Chief Executive Officer, Steven Ballmer, has told the Obama administration that the world’s largest software company would, according to Bloomberg News, “move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.” The U.S. imposes some of the highest taxes on corporations of any nation in the world.

Microsoft which employs more than 95,000 people worldwide draws the bulk of its workers from the United States where 56,552 are based. Higher taxes would reduce its profits by an estimated 10 to 15 percent. One option would be to shed jobs. Another would be to move as many employees as possible to a nation like Ireland or to hire foreign workers to replace them.

Mind you, Obama cannot do this by himself. He needs the help of a Democrat-controlled Congress and he is getting it.

This President and this Congress, minus the powerless Republican minority, are doing everything they can to destroy major elements of the nation’s business and industrial base. Energy producers and providers of oil, natural gas and coal are facing obstacles alongside of those in the nuclear industry. A massive, totally bogus “Cap and Trade” tax will drive up the cost of electricity and cost consumers thousands is in the works.

This is a purposefully induced Depression when the present Recession shows signs of giving way to improving economic forces.

Your Senators and your Representative need to hear from you daily, warning them they will not be reelected if this continues. Get their email address. Use it every day.