Metrics of National Decline, From One Assault On The Constitution To Another, The Long Retreat, and The Rebel Yell: Taxpayers Revolt Against Gimme-Mania
February 20, 2009 Leave a Comment
Rebel Yell: Taxpayers Revolt Against Gimme-Mania
There’s something in the air. It’s the smell of roasted pork. President Obama heralded the signing of the trillion-dollar “stimulus” bill in Denver and promoted his massive mortgage entitlement expansion in Mesa, Ariz., at tightly controlled campaign events. But outside the Secret Service perimeters, a raucous grassroots rebellion against Beltway spending binges has caught fire. The new Boston Tea Party is here, baby, and it’s doused in barbecue sauce.
The first revolt took place on Presidents Day in Smurf-blue Seattle, where mom-blogger Keli Carender hastily organized a downtown demonstration to oppose what they called the “stimulus rip-off.” A motley band of nearly 100 protesters—moms and their kids, college students, libertarians, taxpayer groups, GOP activists—raised their voices and dined on pulled pork (donated by yours truly). They assailed both the substance of the overstuffed stimulus package and the short-circuited, nontransparent process by which it was passed.
Some wore pig noses. Others waved Old Glory and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags. Their handmade signs read: “Say No to Generational Theft”; “Obama’$ Porkulu$ Wear$ Lip$tick”; and “I don’t want to pay for the SwindleUs! I’m only 10 years old!” The event was peaceful, save for an unhinged city-dweller who showed his tolerance by barging onto the speakers’ stage and giving a Nazi salute.
Carender, a newcomer to political activism, shared advice for other first-timers: “Basically, everyone, you just have to do it. Call up your police station or parks department and ask how you can obtain a permit, and then just start advertising. The word will spread. I am only one person, but with a little hard work this protest has become the efforts of a lot of people.”
Why bother? It’s for posterity’s sake. For the historical record. And hopefully it will spur others to move from the phones and computers to the streets. For Carender, it’s just the beginning. She gathered all the attendees’ e-mail addresses and will keep up the pressure.
“We need to show that we exist. Second, we need to show support for the Republicans and Democrats that voted against the porkulus. If they think, for one second, that they made a bad choice, we have no chance to fight. Third, it sends a message to Obama and Pelosi that we are awake and we know what’s happening and we are not going to take it lying down. It is a message saying, ‘Expect more opposition because we’re out here.’”
The anti-pork activists turned out in Denver, too. On Tuesday, while Obama cocooned himself at the city’s Museum of Nature and Science for the stimulus signing, a crowd of nearly 300 gathered on the Capitol steps on their lunch hour to flame-broil the spending bill and feast on roasted pig (also donated by yours truly). Jim Pfaff of Colorado’s fiscal conservative citizens group Americans for Prosperity condemned the “Ponzi scheme, Madoff style“ stimulus and led the crowd in chants of “No more pork!” Free-market think-tank head Jon Caldara of the Independence Institute brought oversized checks representing the $30,000 stimulus debt load for American families.
On Wednesday in Mesa, local conservative talk station KFYI spearheaded a third large protest to welcome Obama as he unveiled a $100 billion to $200 billion program to bail out banks and beleaguered borrowers having trouble paying their mortgages. The entitlement theme played well last week in Florida, where Obama played Santa Claus to enraptured supporters shamelessly seeking government presents. But nearly 500 protesters in Mesa came to reject the savior-based economy with signs mocking gimme-mania.
Their posters jeered: “Give me Pelosi’s Plane”; “Annual Passes to Disneyland”; “Fund Bikini Wax Now”; “Stimulate the Economy: Give Me a Tummy Tuck”; “Free Beer for My Horses.“
And my favorite: “Give me liberty or at least a big-screen TV.“
Plans are underway for anti-stimulus-palooza protests in Overland Park, Kan., Nashville and New York—home of smug Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer. Schumer’s derisive comment on the Senate floor about the “chattering classes” who oppose reckless spending has not been forgotten or forgiven. The insult spurred central Kentucky talk show host Leland Conway to organize a pork rind drive. Angry taxpayers bombarded the senator’s office with 1,500 bags of cracklins.
Disgraced Democratic Sen. John Edwards was right about one thing: There are two Americas. One America is full of moochers, big and small, corporate and individual, trampling over themselves with their hands out demanding endless bailouts. The other America is full of disgusted, hardworking citizens getting sick of being played for chumps and punished for practicing personal responsibility.
Now is the time for all good taxpayers to turn the tables on free-lunching countrymen and their enablers in Washington. Community organizing helped propel Barack Obama to the White House. It can work for fiscal conservatism, too.
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Michelle Malkin [email her] is author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s review. Click here for Michelle Malkin’s website. Michelle Malkin’s latest book is “Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild.“
The Long Retreat
“The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating,” said President Obama, as he announced deployment of 17,000 more U.S. troops.
“I’m absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism in that region, solely through military means.” [Obama orders 17,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, Reuters, February 18, 2009]
“(T)here is no military solution in Afghanistan,” says Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Said U.S. Commander Gen. David McKiernan yesterday, U.S. and NATO forces are “stalemated.”
Such admissions by our military and political leadership in a time of war call to mind other words heard back in 1951, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur delivered his farewell address to the Congress:
“(O)nce war is forced upon us,” said MacArthur, “there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision.
“In war, there is no substitute for victory.”
But if victory over the Taliban has been ruled out by the United States, have the Taliban ruled out a victory over the American Empire to rival the one their fathers won over the Soviet Empire?
What price are we prepared to pay, in “prolonged indecision,” to avert such an end to a war now in its eighth year?
America had best brace herself for difficult days ahead.
For stepping back from the dreary prognosis for Afghanistan, a new reality becomes clear. The long retreat has begun.
Whether it is in the 23 months Gen. Petraeus favors, or the 16 months Obama promised, the United States is coming home from Iraq.
The retreat from Central Asia is already underway. Expelled from the K-2 air base in Uzbekistan in 2005, the United States has now been ordered out of the Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan. Abkhazia and South Ossetia, ripped away from Georgia by Russia last August, are never going to be returned. And we all know it.
Georgia and Ukraine, most realists now realize, are not going to be admitted to NATO. We’re not going to fight Russia over the Crimea. And the U.S. anti-missile missiles and radars George Bush intended to deploy in Poland and the Czech Republic will not now be deployed.
For Washington has fish to fry with Russia, and the price of her cooperation is withdrawal of U.S. military forces from her backyard and front porch. And the warm words flowing between Moscow and Washington suggest the deal is done.
With tensions rising in Korea, too, it is hard to believe President Obama will bolster ground forces on the peninsula, when even Donald Rumsfeld was presiding over a drawdown and a shifting of U.S. troops away from the DMZ.
In Latin America, the United States seems reconciled to the rise of an anti-American radical-socialist coalition, led by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and embracing Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Cuba.
Partisans of President Bush may blame Obama for presiding over a strategic retreat, but it is the Bush administration that assured and accelerated such a retreat.
As Robert Pape of the University of Chicago writes in The National Interest: “America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today’s world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back at the Bush administration years as the death knell of American hegemony.” [Empire Fails, January 22, 2009]
Pape’s harsh verdict is rooted in his reading of history, that the “size of an economy relative to potential rivals ultimately determines the limits of power in international politics.”
In other words, when a great nation’s share of world product shrinks, the nation’s strategic position follows. Between 2000 and 2008, the U.S. share of world product plunged from 31 percent to 23 percent, and is expected to fall to 21 percent by 2013 — a decline of 32 percent in 13 years. China’s share of world product over the same period will more than double to 9 percent.
Pape went back to the 19th century to correlate the rise of the great powers like Britain and the commensurate growth in their share of world product. He found the Bush decline had no precedent.
“America’s relative decline since 2000 of some 30 percent represents a far greater loss of relative power in a shorter time than any power shift among European great powers roughly from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to World War II. It is one of the largest relative declines in modern history. Indeed, in size, it is clearly surpassed by only one other great-power decline, the unprecedented internal collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.”
With an economy still three times that of China, America continues to be the world’s most powerful nation, fully capable of defending all of its vital interests. We can no longer, however, defend every ally to whom we made a commitment over the six decades since NATO was formed.
Obama’s assignment: Rebuild U.S. productive power, and execute a strategic withdrawal from non-vital commitments.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America
From One Assault On The Constitution To Another
The US Constitution has few friends on the right or the left.
During the first eight years of the 21st century, the Republicans mercilessly assaulted civil liberties. The brownshirt Bush regime ignored the protections provided by habeas corpus. They spied on American citizens without warrants. They violated the First Amendment. They elevated decisions of the president above US statutory law and international law. They claimed the power to withhold information from the people’s representatives in Congress, and they asserted, and behaved as if, they were unaccountable to the people, Congress, and the federal courts. The executive branch claimed the power to ignore congressional subpoenas. Republicans regarded Bush as a Stuart king unaccountable to law.
The Bush brownshirt regime revealed itself as lawless, the worst criminal organization in American history.
Now we have the Democrats, and the assault on civil liberty continues. President Obama doesn’t want to hold Bush accountable for his crimes and violations of the Constitution, because Obama wants to retain the powers that Bush asserted. Even the practice of kidnapping people and transporting them to foreign countries to be tortured has been retained by President Obama.
The civil liberties that Bush stole from us are now in Obama’s pocket.
Will it turn out that we enjoyed more liberty under Bush than we will under Obama? At least the Republicans left us the Second Amendment. The Obama Democrats are not going to return our other purloined civil liberties, and they are already attacking the Second Amendment.
Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D, IL) has introduced the Blair Holt Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009. As the British and Australians learned, once firearms are registered, the government knows where they are. The government’s next step is to confiscate the firearms.
Moreover, the Act would permit the government to negate Second Amendment rights by refusing to issue a license. Any parents who bequeathed family antique or historic firearms to heirs would be in violation of the act, as it bans any transfer of a firearm other than via a licensed dealer.
William Blackstone, the revered 18th century defender of liberty whose Commentaries on the Laws of England was a bestseller in colonial America, wrote that “the last auxiliary right“ of free men is “having arms for their defense.” Blackstone, England’s greatest jurist, said that the right to bear arms enables the “natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.”
The Bush regime’s reversion to medieval methods of incarceration and torture are an indication that we now live in a time “when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.” Why do the Democrats desire Americans to be helpless in the face of oppression by the armed state. How can it be that Democrats want Americans to be free from the threat of being thrown into dungeons and locked away without a court ever hearing evidence, but are prepared to deny Americans the ability to resist such horrendous treatment should it come their way?
In response to my question, one progressive acquaintance said that he wanted to reduce “gun violence.” As guns are inanimate objects, I assume he meant violence committed by people who use guns instead of knives, fists or some other weapon.
“Gun violence” is not something committed by the vast majority of gun owners. “Gun violence” is the preserve of the criminal elements, such as gangs fighting over drug turf. Criminals are already prohibited from owning guns, but criminals pay no more attention to this law than they do to laws against robbery, rape, and murder. Why do Democrats think that disarming law-abiding citizens will disarm outlaws? For how many decades have drugs been banned? Does any Democrat think that the ban on drugs has succeeded?
All the ban on drugs has done is to make the drug trade profitable. Now people fight over it. How can guns be successfully banned when the war on drugs is a failure? All a gun ban would do is to create a new criminal activity.
England, in violation of its unwritten constitution, banned ownership of pistols and rifles. But now the police have to be heavily armed, because criminals are now armed, but not law-abiding citizens. When I lived in England, the police were not armed with firearms. I remember reading a few years after the passage of England’s gun ban that criminals were selling submachine guns on London street corners. The police discovered a warehouse in London filled to the brim with machine guns that were being sold to all comers.
So much for gun bans. They only disarm the law abiding and leave them defenseless.
Gun bans also greatly increase the crime rate. When households are armed, robbers prefer houses where no one is home. In England, criminals are no longer deterred from entering an occupied home. The more people at home the better. There might be someone to rape and someone to beat up. There is little to fear from a disarmed household.
When I lived in the metro area of Washington DC, I resided on the Virginia side of the Potomac. There was no problem with owning a gun in Virginia, but in DC, until the recent Supreme Court ruling, the only way a person could have a firearm was to keep it disassembled and unloaded.
The Washington “gun control” ordinance benefitted criminals. The crime rate in DC was much higher than across the river. Despite, or because of, the gun ban, DC was the murder capital of the US.
Police seldom, if ever, prevent a crime. Their job is to appear after a crime is committed and to investigate with a view to identifying the perpetrator. A large number of careful studies show that private gun ownership prevents far more crimes than police ever solve. Criminals are routinely deterred, apprehended, and sometimes killed, by armed private citizens.
In contrast, police, especially the notorious SWAT teams, accidentally kill more law abiding citizens than they do criminals. If anyone should be disarmed, it is the police. When police become militarized, as they increasingly are in the US, their attitude toward the public changes from protective to hostile.
Militarized SWAT teams have established a record of showing up at the wrong address.
In Maryland recently, a SWAT team mistook the mayor and his wife for drug dealers. A large number of armed men in black, and not identified as police, broke into the mayor’s home, killed the family’s Labrador dogs, and held the mayor and his wife spread eagled on the floor with loaded automatic weapons a few inches from their heads. Fortunately for the mayor and his wife, a local policeman happened by and informed the paramilitary unit that it was the mayor and his wife whom the SWAT team was terrorizing.
Many progressives oppose gun ownership because they have sympathy for animals and oppose hunting. However, most gun owners are not hunters. Most members of gun clubs are content to shoot holes in paper targets or at clay pigeons. They enjoy hand-eye coordination, the study of ballistics, and reloading for antique rifles. An outing is really just a chance to get together, to talk about history and the load they are working up for their 1873 Winchester, and to enjoy each other’s company.
There is a vast number of small businesses that exist because of gun ownership. Repairs, customizing, parts, sights, brass, bullets, primers, and powders for reloading, reloading equipment, targets, cleaning, refinishing, engraving, it goes on and on. What would happen to these hundreds of thousands of people, to the family businesses and to the skills accumulated, if Americans are deprived of their Second Amendment rights? We would have another million people deprived of livelihood and on the streets. Would they turn to crime?
The progressive canard is that the Second Amendment, unlike the rest of the amendments to the Constitution, is not a constitutional right for citizens. Rather it is a right for a defunct organization known as the militia. Why in the world would the Founding Fathers, when laying out the rights of individuals, confound the point by sticking in among individual rights a right for a military organization?
But so what if they did. Americans have had squatter’ rights to firearms since 1776.
In 1992 when the Supreme Court revisited Roe v. Wade, the justices acknowledged that the legal argument behind the 1973 decision legitimizing abortion was flawed. However, the justices ruled that women had exercised abortion rights for 19 years, and the passage of time had given women squatters’ rights to abortions.
Americans have exercised Second Amendment rights for 234 years. Regardless of the meaning of the Second Amendment, the right of adverse possession makes gun rights final. To assault such a well grounded right is an act of tyranny.
Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
Metrics of National Decline
“Bush Boom Continues” trilled the headline over the Lawrence Kudlow column, as George W. Bush closed out his seventh year in office. [NRO, December 10, 2007]
“You can call it Goldilocks 2.0,” purred Kudlow.[Email him]
Yes, you could. But what a difference 12 months can make.
Final returns are now in on the eight years of George Bush. Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services has crunched the numbers. And, pace Kudlow, the only relevant comparison is to Herbert Hoover.
From January 2008, right after Kudlow’s column ran, through January 2009, the U.S. economy lost 3.5 million jobs. The private sector loss of 3.65 million jobs was slightly offset by 148,000 jobs created by federal, state and local governments. Say what you will, the Bush years were boom times for Big Government.
And the private sector? Beginning and ending in recession, the Bush presidency added a net of 407,000 private sector jobs over eight years, less than 51,000 a year, the worst eight-year record since 1927-35, which includes the first six years of the Great Depression.
By January 2009, the average workweek had fallen to 33.3 hours, the lowest since record keeping began in 1964.
From Jan. 31, 2001, through Jan. 31, 2009, 4.4 million manufacturing jobs, 26 percent of all of the manufacturing jobs in the United States, disappeared.
Semiconductors and electronic component producers lost 42 percent of their jobs. Communications equipment producers lost 48 percent of their jobs. Textile and apparel producers lost, respectively, 63 percent and 61 percent of their jobs.
As a source of American jobs, manufacturing, for the first time in our history, fell below health care and education in 2001, below retail sales in 2002, below local government in 2006, below leisure and hospitality, i.e., restaurants and bars, in 2008.
Between this unprecedented loss in manufacturing capacity and jobs, and the $3.5 trillion in trade deficits in manufactured goods alone, run up by George W. Bush, the correlation is absolute.
Last week, final trade figures for 2008 came in. They make for riveting reading for Americans who yet believe that manufacturing is an indispensable element of national power.
With China exporting five times the dollar volume in goods to us as she imports from us, Beijing’s trade surplus with the United States set yet another world record: $266 billion.
In those critical items the Commerce Department defines as advanced technology products (ATP), our trade deficit with China in 2008 reached an astonishing $72 billion. Since Bush took office, our total trade deficit with China in ATP exceeds $300 billion.
Which of us, China or America, has the trade profile of a mature industrial and technological power?
Americans deplore our deepening dependence on foreign regimes for the vital necessity of oil. Are they unaware that the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods, $440 billion, is $89 billion greater than our all-time record trade deficit of $351 billion in crude oil?
Why is a dependence on Canada, Mexico, Venezuela or Saudi Arabia for oil a greater peril than a reliance on China and Asia for vital necessities upon which our prosperity and military depend?
A week ago, the Washington Times (“Volcker Blames Recession on Trade Imbalances“) reported that ex-Fed Chair Paul Volcker told Congress the “massive trade-related imbalances in the United States economy were the source of the financial crisis.”
Pressed by Sen. Chris Dodd, Volcker said, “Go back to the imbalances in the economy. The United States has been consuming more than it has been producing for many years.”
What “imbalances” was Volcker referring to? Perhaps these.
Since 1982, the United States has run $5.7 trillion in trade deficits in manufactured goods, and $2.1 trillion in trade deficits in auto parts, trucks and automobiles. In the Bush years alone, the United States ran more than $1 trillion in trade deficits in auto parts, trucks and cars.
These statistics, these realities—factories closing in the United States, manufacturing jobs being outsourced in the millions to China and Asia, enormous, endless trade deficits in goods—testify to a painful truth: America is a receding and declining world power.
And in dealing with this systemic crisis, Obama’s stimulus package is as irrelevant as were the Bush tax cuts.
How do we correct those “trade-related imbalances” of which Volcker spoke? We must export more and import less, save more and spend less, produce more and consume less. We need to emulate the ants and behave less like the grasshoppers of summer.
But how do you tell that to two generations of Americans who have been raised in an era of entitlement?
America needs an Industrial Policy.
But how do you tell that to Americans indoctrinated in the hoary myth that Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley caused the Great Depression and anything that sounds like America First risks a rerun of the 1930s?
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Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America
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