The political right and left has been fighting each other tooth and nail for decades over the spoils of the emerging fascist state in our midst.
Polarization along Republican and Democrat party lines has not led to a stalemate, as traditional political theory might predict. The abandonment of Constitutional limitations intended to check all forms of collectivism with the enshrinement of individual rights has led America not to a dangerous fork in the road, but to a convergence of nationalist and socialist policies culminating in a haphazard form of fascism.
It is not the argument of this article that those on the right and left intend to create a fascist state in America. But both sides are engaging in a dangerous game of chicken. The left is betting that the road to socialism is to guide capitalism through the death throes of fascism (viz. government control of property), leading to the destruction of private property. The right is betting that its corporate sponsors can harness the state to hedge against risk and plunder the American public. If each side continues unabated in violation of the Constitution, we will all likely find ourselves licking jackboots.
The modern right is essentially nationalist, while the modern left is almost thoroughly socialist. It is the sad state of affairs that America's political spectrum now makes the most sense if thought of in terms of pre-revolutionary France. American conservatives should be thought of as Constitutionalists who endorse liberty, and therefore should not be classified on either the right or the left of the collectivist spectrum.
Drawing on our political framework, today's Republican party can be categorized and referred to as the political right, and the Democrat party, the political left. This is a generalization only, and is not indicative of the degree of radicalism in each party. The Democrat party is more radical in its degree of socialism than the Republican party is in terms of its nationalism (as opposed to patriotism, which in America includes reverence for the Constitution).
Both parties can be better understood if shot through the prism of turn-of-the-century progressive politics: The Republicans cut from the cloth of Teddy Roosevelt, and the Democrats, of Woodrow Wilson. Progressivism can be seen as America's peculiar form of proto-fascism.
For all intents and purposes, the term "right" refers mainly to the Republican party, and the "left" predominately (though not exclusively) to the Democrat party.
Today’s right is comprised of nationalists who put up staged, phony fights on behalf of liberty and the Constitution, promote a police state in the name of "security," seek to export “democracy” to third-world hell-holes where the population has no grasp of the basics of a free society, spend like half-deranged lunatics, and battle hardest to garner perquisites for their corporate sponsors.
Today’s left is filled with lotus-chewing socialist moonbats who endorse wealth redistribution and suicidal economics, build crony coalitions using divide-and-conquer politics, oppose all forms of reasonable self-defense against terrorists, vilify and attack whites and Christians, and essentially war against the social freedom they purport most to stand for.
Whether through ideological affinity or mutual lust for power, the lack of the right and left's effective opposition against each other results in a perverse form of collaboration that is a recipe for disaster: Nationalists essentially cooperating with socialists.
Each side seems to have brokered a devil’s bargain: The right has winked to the left “give us war and national defense and we will give you social and domestic issues.” The Constitution is a punchline to both parties, and the joke’s on us.
There appears to be a convergence of right and left progressivism taking place in this country, and the American people are shocked and nearly paralyzed. Until recently most of us believed we lived in the best, freest nation on earth. Now we are staring into the sunset upon the landscape of our nation's recent history, and what appeared to be a land of milk and honey is now covered in blood and shadow. What happened?
The American people have been subjected to an incrementally escalating psychological warfare campaign carried out by cultural Marxists for decades. As America was being built up on the right, mostly on militaristic grounds, the progressives were ransacking the culture and the economy.
While the capitalist economy was being imperceptibly undermined through institutions like the Federal Reserve and the graduated income tax, the leftist media conditioned people's perception of economic reality, namely, by vilifying free market capitalism. Living at the future's expense through debt and the illusory "wealth creation" scheme of the Federal Reserve afforded us the luxury of psychological denial.
Cultural Marxists undertook the campaign decades ago because the American economy defied the predictions of traditional Marxists. Instead of industrialization and the advanced capitalist economy leading to decreasing wages and a diminished standard of living for workers, American capitalism lifted more people out of poverty than in any country in the history of the world.
Socialists needed a way to defeat America as a shining example of the failure of Marxist theory to predict the improvement of the overwhelming majority of people's lives under capitalism.
The steady erosion of the economic base began with the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank, a central banking system comprised of a consortium of private banks, and the establishment of a graduated income tax. These were two planks straight out of the Communist Manifesto, instituted under the "progressive" Woodrow Wilson in 1913.
With the progressives' establishment of national tax laws and private-public institutions such as the Federal Reserve (and later Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac), the state was able to violate private property, which cordons off and harnesses self-interest for the good of the economy as a whole.
They were then able to degrade the economy from within over decades through the Fed's devaluation of the currency, which benefits Wall Street at the expense of those further along in the circulation of the money supply (money is most valuable when it is first introduced into the economy).
This scheme provided perverse incentives for the pursuit of wealth in the private sector, and led to increasing burdens on the American family through incremental dollar devaluation.
With these institutions established, the Marxists then set out to convince Americans that all the economic disruption and greed around them was the fault of monolithic "free market capitalism." It would be well to note that even the Soviet Union and Maoist China had forms of currency, that didn't make them "capitalists."
After the 1929 stock market crash, the "progressives" seized the day to condemn capitalism, in the sense that it stood as a barrier to the power of the state to "do good" for the American people.
Never mind that history damns the actions of government in both the Hoover and FDR administrations as fruitless and an obstruction to any economic resurgence along the lines of the 1920 natural recovery.
The Federal Reserve gave the game away when after the stock market crash in 1929 it contracted the money supply by raising interest rates, in direct contravention of its charter. This exacerbated the deteriorating economic conditions, made cash "king," and allowed big banks to gobble up smaller insolvent banks like guppies in a small pond.
After the banks had consolidated control, the Fed rapidly expanded credit, which led to yet another crash in 1937.
Perhaps one can do no better to sum up the economic policies of the ever Great(er) Depression than to quote FDR's Secretary of the Treasury Hans Morgenthau:
"We are spending more money than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. After eight years we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot."
But one of the most powerful images that persists in the public mind is that of FDR "saving America" from the hardship wrought by capitalism, "the god that failed." FDR is consistently ranks among scholars in the top five presidents of all time, along with men like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. Ronald Reagan gets no more than a nodding acknowledgment.
After the Great Depression, the cultural Marxists had the exemplar they needed to proceed without abandon in deriding "capitalism" as the source of all our country's woes. The hunger and poverty of the Depression years provided all the imagery the leftists needed to paint any and all opposition to state interventionism as heartless, cruel, and even moronic.
Side by side with the civil rights movement, which Republicans supported and many Democrats opposed, cultural Marxists backed the statists in their drive to build a welfare state and to undertake large national projects.
The result, over time, was increasing government interference, the disruption of markets and the perverse incentives provided by regulations and tax loopholes, escalating spending, debt, inefficiency and waste. All of this, of course, was "capitalism's" fault.
After Goldwater was demonized as a "Nazi" for advocating free markets (economists, try to figure that one out), the man who would become most hated and vilified by the leftist press would be Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was hated for the powerful manner he was able to positively articulate the greatness of America, including free market capitalism. By the time of the 1980s, however, many leftists were convinced that advocating private property and the rule of law was a plot to fortify corporations' stranglehold on the economy.
Yet both the nationalist right and the socialist left have removed the barriers that were designed to keep corporate influence in its place. The media abrogated its responsibility as watchdogs for the American people and become corporatist lapdogs who never saw a big government program they didn't like. Notice not a single mainstream media organization opposed the bailouts, as long as it was their man who was doling out the public treasury.
The press, increasingly undermined by corporations who enjoyed the privileges reaped from fascistic government programs, have become transmission belts for corporate welfare and big government advocacy. What appears to Americans as "left" in this country is often fascism disguised as "progressivism" or "soft socialism."
Now that the American people are catching on, through alternative media sources such as the Internet and "right-wing" radio (i.e. any radio host who promotes responsibility, liberty, and the rule of law) the media has to ridicule conservatives as "kooks," "lunatics," and "fringe" elements. This in a predominately center-right country that gets on an instinctive level that what the government is doing is harmful and self-defeating.
Though the left's cultural Marxist tactics are outdated and people are catching on to the fascist game going on, there is a danger that the push back may be too little, too late. Nationalists (neo-conservatives) and socialists (progressives) seem to be playing a game of musical chairs, accumulating governmental power for a present or future dictator within the bounds of each politician’s respective party, building a welfare-police state that never seems to gets rolled back. The results, well, let's just say that those aware of history have seen this all before.
Though the history books refer to them as simply “the Nazis,” the party’s full translated name is the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. Imagine something like neo-conservatives, RINOs, and progressives marching in lock-step towards recreating 1930s Germany. This is not just hyperbole, read the Nazi party platform.
The hacks in the media conducting psychological warfare on any Americans who oppose big government, with false allegations, ridicule, and stereotyping, need a history lesson if they believe for a minute that what this government is doing is consistent with "hope and change." You see, this has all been tried before, and most people know it. The difference is that it was done by one party, and not two.
The media will continue to call conservatives crazy and racists and insist that we are ignorant, delusional, and dangerous for opposing big government led by any statist; be his name Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, or Barack Obama. But we are for liberty, we are for the Constitution, and we are not fooling around.
The past four presidents have not for stood for liberty or the Constitution. President Bush Sr. decreed a ban on offshore oil drilling that would make any radical environmentalist proud. President Clinton promoted the police state through support for the electronic spy project Echelon. Bush Jr. did not just pass the Patriot Act, he created a massive new entitlement program with the prescription drug package Medicare Part D. President Obama is not only recklessly spending America into oblivion, he has continued the Patriot Act, turned the Department of Homeland Security against the civilian population, continued the program of extraordinary rendition, and endorsed the assassination of terrorists, even if American citizens. And he has done it all under the banner of creating "hope and change."
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights is our only guide to controlling both the political right and left. What we have come to learn in our time is that neither document is self-enforcing. Transforming a nation founded on freedom and liberty to a predatory police state would indeed be a "change." The only hope it has inspired for the majority of us, however, is that the American people are finally waking up and are poised to put government back in its box, for our own good and that of our posterity.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Al Qaeda Affiliate Takes Over Somalia
In the port of Kismayo, a young girl accused of adultery was buried up to her neck in the field of a soccer stadium packed with spectators, and then stoned to death; her family said that she was only thirteen years old and had in fact been gang-raped. This summer, in the ancient coastal town of Merca, the Shabaab decreed that gold and silver dental fillings were un-Islamic, and dispatched patrols to yank them out of people's mouths
Absurd Enviroidiocy Goes Beyond Grotesque
Four men from a village in Peru, armed with environmentally-friendly paint, are undertaking one of the most bizarre plans to combat rising temperatures in the Andes--by painting the mountains white. The hope is that more heat will be reflected away from the icy mountain range, which has seen many of its glaciers melting away from increased warming over the last few decades. What sort of eccentric genius could secure the funds for such an ambitious plan? Well, his name Eduardo Gold, and he won a contest. (...)
In fact, the whitewashing was selected as one of the top proposals in the World Bank's "100 Ideas to Save the Planet" competition held last year, allowing Mr. Gold to secure some $200 thousand to see it realized.
The Iron Lady of the Western World
It contains no magic formula or lavish promises. It is not a recipe for an easy or a perfect life.
A bizarre beginning for an election manifesto, isn’t it? Magic formulas and lavish promises are exactly what politicians are routinely bestowing upon the masses. Bread and circuses, the communist paradise, the thousand-year Reich, the New Deal, the New Frontier, Great Society and Hope and Change - we’ve heard enough of this. But this time, the voters were offered something different:
It sets out a broad framework for the recovery of our country, based not on dogma, but on reason, on common sense, above all on the liberty of the people under the law.
The guiding principle of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election manifesto is common sense. The emphasis put on reason is a relic of the rational Enlightenment worldview. Unlike the left, she didn’t use Enlightenment rhetoric as a façade for savage and primitive nonsense. She meant it. Unlike much of the American right, she based her ideas on reason, not on barbarous religious faith.
Common sense means a staunch commitment to reality. That means: no compromise:
If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.
Thatcher had a profound distaste for pragmatism and consensus:
To me, consensus seems to be: the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that need to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?
She knew that socialism and collectivism could only be defeated by firm allegiance to fundamental principles, not by stealth, fraud, evasion, and horse-trading:
For my part, I favour an approach to statecraft that embraces principles, as long as it is not stifled by them; and I prefer such principles to be accompanied by steel along with good intentions.
In another display of her principled stance, Thatcher commented on whether she would repeat Prime Minister Edward Heath's "U-turn" (a policy change from free-market economics to statism):
To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning.
When at a conservative party meeting an apparatchik suggested following a pragmatic middle-of-the-road policy, Thatcher triumphantly held up a copy of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty and said: “This is what we believe!” The party cadre were taken aback.
A bizarre beginning for an election manifesto, isn’t it? Magic formulas and lavish promises are exactly what politicians are routinely bestowing upon the masses. Bread and circuses, the communist paradise, the thousand-year Reich, the New Deal, the New Frontier, Great Society and Hope and Change - we’ve heard enough of this. But this time, the voters were offered something different:
It sets out a broad framework for the recovery of our country, based not on dogma, but on reason, on common sense, above all on the liberty of the people under the law.
The guiding principle of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election manifesto is common sense. The emphasis put on reason is a relic of the rational Enlightenment worldview. Unlike the left, she didn’t use Enlightenment rhetoric as a façade for savage and primitive nonsense. She meant it. Unlike much of the American right, she based her ideas on reason, not on barbarous religious faith.
Common sense means a staunch commitment to reality. That means: no compromise:
If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.
Thatcher had a profound distaste for pragmatism and consensus:
To me, consensus seems to be: the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that need to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?
She knew that socialism and collectivism could only be defeated by firm allegiance to fundamental principles, not by stealth, fraud, evasion, and horse-trading:
For my part, I favour an approach to statecraft that embraces principles, as long as it is not stifled by them; and I prefer such principles to be accompanied by steel along with good intentions.
In another display of her principled stance, Thatcher commented on whether she would repeat Prime Minister Edward Heath's "U-turn" (a policy change from free-market economics to statism):
To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning.
When at a conservative party meeting an apparatchik suggested following a pragmatic middle-of-the-road policy, Thatcher triumphantly held up a copy of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty and said: “This is what we believe!” The party cadre were taken aback.
What matters is that her free-market convictions were not based on pragmatic or utilitarian considerations, like those of 19th-century Benthamite “radicals” (Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill). Nor were they based on the moronic conservative view that “selfish” and “greedy” capitalism is inevitable because of man’s inherently fallible and wicked nature. She knew that capitalism was morally right. Moreover, it is the only moral political system. It is socialism that is morally corrupt. Thatcher did not succumb to the view, held by many, that capitalism is right in terms of economics but somewhat rotten in ethical terms. In 1977 John Hoskyns, a policy advisor to Thatcher, sent her a memo saying the following:
Voters must feel a deep moral disgust with the Labour-Trades Union alliance and its results - a “sick society” (disappointment with material results is not enough).
Thatcher’s pro-capitalist mindset was not so much a product of the Austrian School or Chicago School but of the rich British common-sense tradition that goes back centuries:
Let me give you my vision. A man's right to work as he will. To spend what he earns. To own property. To have the state as servant and not as master. These are the British inheritance.
This inheritance has been almost banished from metropolitan areas but remained in small towns like Thatcher’s Grantham in Lincolnshire. Here, in this small oasis of Merrie Englande next to an ancient Roman road that had brought civilization to local tribes, Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics, went to school, while Thatcher’s antithesis, radical proto-socialist Thomas Paine, resided here for a while. Not far from here, in the nearby Nottinghamshire’s Sherwood Forest, Robin Hood - the idol of socialists - used to “spread the wealth around.” Here she was raised in her common-sense father’s grocery shop, inculcated with what is misleadingly referred to as “small-town virtues” or “a philistine, petty bourgeois mindset” but is really the fundamental values of the Western civilization:
My policies are based not on some economics theory, but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest day's work for an honest day's pay; live within your means; put by a nest egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police.
Her wholesale repudiation of collectivism is the core tenet of the Western way of life:
There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people.
Thatcher’s radical individualism and moral integrity were remarkable but there are some “buts.” Though religion was not the basis of her convictions, in contrast to some American conservatives, she did have religious convictions and sometimes erroneously connected them with capitalism. Though she was not inclined to compromise, she had to do that in some cases because politics is the “art of the possible.” Moreover, eventually her principled stance clashed with political reality, which was the reason of her downfall. Though she was an implicit advocate of egoism, she didn’t fully get rid of altruist prejudices.
Thatcher was neither an economist nor a philosopher and therefore could not be fully consistent in her common-sense views. She did not have sufficient expertise for that. After all, it wasn’t her job. Since she was not a profound theoretical thinker, she could only make cosmetic changes to the world around her and was unable to make a major contribution to stopping our civilization’s cultural collapse.
However, she still matters. She matters because her life demonstrates that the West, despite its cultural disintegration and ongoing death throes, is still capable of producing people who stand for its initial values of reason, individualism and liberty under law - people who possess moral integrity, common sense and an indomitable spirit. Thatcher is a resurrection of what the West used to be, must be and, hopefully, will be again.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Pulling the Red Threads of the 'New World Order'
Sometimes seemingly innocuous research can take a darker turn.
While researching the oil trade between the United States and the Soviet Union, I was struck by several odd policy choices made by the Nixon administration. Particularly jolting was the discovery that the presumably hawkish Nixon dismissed the notion that disrupting the Soviet Union's energy trade was a serious policy priority with important implications for American foreign relations. As Bruce Jentleson puts it in his tendentiously left-leaning book Pipeline Politics:
It is interesting to note, especially in light of later events, that in assessing these prospects for American-Soviet energy trade and cooperative ventures, the CIA and the Nixon administration in general dismissed the notion that American security interests might be threatened.
Without delving into the weeds on the nuances of the history of the Soviet oil trade, it should be noted generally that the USSR was notorious for dumping its vast oil and gas resources onto the world markets, using trade as a weapon to kneecap American companies, and more broadly, as part of a strategy of creating energy dependents, and specifically, pulling Europe into its sphere of influence. In hindsight, the Soviets laid the foundation for today's Russia to politically and economically blackmail former satellites using "pipeline politics." [It should also be noted that in the 1970s the CIA was routinely inaccurate in its assessment of Soviet threats, especially after the departure of counterintelligence wizard James "Jesus" Angleton in 1975. President Reagan was prescient enough to reverse the trend of accommodating the expansion of the Soviets' oil and gas trade by unpopularly blocking the sale of equipment and technological assistance needed for the USSR to expand its pipeline network in Western Europe. Socialist-leaning Europe was not so cognizant of the threat of future energy dependence on Russia and undermined Reagan's trade sanctions.]
The revelation that Nixon and Kissinger contorted to get out of the way of Soviet energy objectives threw into a less benign light such foreign policy positions as trading grain to the Soviet Union during the famine of 1971-1972, which freed up economic resources for the USSR to continue developing its military arsenal and nuclear weapons stockpiles; the improvement of American relations with communist China in accordance with the presumably "brilliant" strategy of detente; the unilateral disbanding of biological weapons in the United States under the guidance of Henry Kissinger; a series of arms limitations treaties, which eased pressure on the Soviet Union in the Cold War arms race; the disastrous abandoning of the gold standard, which removed limitations on the printing of the dollar, and the closing of the gold window, which led to the routing of America's gold reserves, and Kissinger's endorsement of the decision to cut-and-run in Vietnam (see "peace with honor"), leading from Nixon's threat to resume bombings against North Vietnam to the ultimately disastrous Paris Peace Accords (which earned Kissinger a share of the Nobel Peace Prize), and we get a strange picture discordant with the popular narrative that Nixon and Kissinger were "hawks" intent on opposing the influence of communism in the world.
My suspicion of these policy choices revolves around the enigmatic figure of Henry Kissinger, well-known to be a member (not on the official list, but Rashid Khalidi is!) of the internationalist Council on Foreign Relations and the associated Tri-lateral Commission (also unlisted as a member there). These "mental itches" (as I call them) were scratched by a piece written by J.R. Nyquist, who discussed Kissinger's intelligence associations and even an accusation by well-known spy outer Colonel General Goleniewski, who had been in communist Poland's intelligence services, that Kissinger was working for the Soviets. I cannot attest to the veracity of such a wild accusation, especially one made by an odd figure like Goleniewski (who also claimed to be the direct descendant of the last czar of Russia), but I am struck by Kissinger's defensive remark to the charge:
I don't know who Colonel Goleniewski is, but I think he should be given the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Such a snide off-hand remark is problematic for Kissinger, who also worked in intelligence, and who had read numerous briefings, and is likely to have been aware of a man who was outing Soviet moles left and right in Europe. If Goleniewski's charges were the only spaghetti to stick to Kissinger's wall, so to speak, then one would say that our subject had escaped hot water. But there are other curious reasons to suspect Kissinger had ulterior motives with his often duplicitous policy positions, his favoritism for shady leftist characters (see Nyquist article above) and even an NSA intercept that supposedly shows that Kissinger revealed American operative in Russia "TRIGON" to Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin (this is presumably unverifiable). At the very least, I am perplexed about this "architect of detente," and his role in pushing America towards what the KGB called "universal convergence" with the communist superstates of Russia and China. To quote prominent counterintelligence analyst Leonard McCoy, ""Am I crazy to think this about Kissinger?"
But it appears that things are even worse than I first thought. Along comes an article, published today, admittedly by the hit-and-miss World Net Daily, entitled, "Kissinger: Obama primed to create 'New World Order'." In the balanced and moderately toned article, Kissinger praises Obama for his choice of advisers and just last year, Kissinger spoke openly of the opportunity he saw for creating a 'new world order' - out of international crisis.
Kissinger's sudden re-emergence onto the public scene is oddly timed considering Obama's own bizarre form of "detente" with the socialist and terrorist-sponsoring world.
When Obama's counter-productive domestic policies, prostrate foreign policy stance, and internationalist bent is taken together with the recent pronouncement of Russian president Dmitri Medvedev endorsing a "new world order," I'm sorry, but I'm starting to get spooked. As Medvedev, the hand-groomed successor of KGB officer Vladimir Putin, put it:
What had seemed untouchable has collapsed. The bubbles [ultimately created by the Federal Reserve and fiat currency - ed.] that created the illusion of flourishing economies have burst. For Russia this situation is a challenge and an opportunity. We are living in a unique time. And we should use it to build a modern, flourishing and strong Russia … which will be a co-founder of the new world economic order and a full participant in the collective political leadership of the post-crisis world.”
Kissinger couldn't have put it any better himself.
While researching the oil trade between the United States and the Soviet Union, I was struck by several odd policy choices made by the Nixon administration. Particularly jolting was the discovery that the presumably hawkish Nixon dismissed the notion that disrupting the Soviet Union's energy trade was a serious policy priority with important implications for American foreign relations. As Bruce Jentleson puts it in his tendentiously left-leaning book Pipeline Politics:
It is interesting to note, especially in light of later events, that in assessing these prospects for American-Soviet energy trade and cooperative ventures, the CIA and the Nixon administration in general dismissed the notion that American security interests might be threatened.
Without delving into the weeds on the nuances of the history of the Soviet oil trade, it should be noted generally that the USSR was notorious for dumping its vast oil and gas resources onto the world markets, using trade as a weapon to kneecap American companies, and more broadly, as part of a strategy of creating energy dependents, and specifically, pulling Europe into its sphere of influence. In hindsight, the Soviets laid the foundation for today's Russia to politically and economically blackmail former satellites using "pipeline politics." [It should also be noted that in the 1970s the CIA was routinely inaccurate in its assessment of Soviet threats, especially after the departure of counterintelligence wizard James "Jesus" Angleton in 1975. President Reagan was prescient enough to reverse the trend of accommodating the expansion of the Soviets' oil and gas trade by unpopularly blocking the sale of equipment and technological assistance needed for the USSR to expand its pipeline network in Western Europe. Socialist-leaning Europe was not so cognizant of the threat of future energy dependence on Russia and undermined Reagan's trade sanctions.]
The revelation that Nixon and Kissinger contorted to get out of the way of Soviet energy objectives threw into a less benign light such foreign policy positions as trading grain to the Soviet Union during the famine of 1971-1972, which freed up economic resources for the USSR to continue developing its military arsenal and nuclear weapons stockpiles; the improvement of American relations with communist China in accordance with the presumably "brilliant" strategy of detente; the unilateral disbanding of biological weapons in the United States under the guidance of Henry Kissinger; a series of arms limitations treaties, which eased pressure on the Soviet Union in the Cold War arms race; the disastrous abandoning of the gold standard, which removed limitations on the printing of the dollar, and the closing of the gold window, which led to the routing of America's gold reserves, and Kissinger's endorsement of the decision to cut-and-run in Vietnam (see "peace with honor"), leading from Nixon's threat to resume bombings against North Vietnam to the ultimately disastrous Paris Peace Accords (which earned Kissinger a share of the Nobel Peace Prize), and we get a strange picture discordant with the popular narrative that Nixon and Kissinger were "hawks" intent on opposing the influence of communism in the world.
My suspicion of these policy choices revolves around the enigmatic figure of Henry Kissinger, well-known to be a member (not on the official list, but Rashid Khalidi is!) of the internationalist Council on Foreign Relations and the associated Tri-lateral Commission (also unlisted as a member there). These "mental itches" (as I call them) were scratched by a piece written by J.R. Nyquist, who discussed Kissinger's intelligence associations and even an accusation by well-known spy outer Colonel General Goleniewski, who had been in communist Poland's intelligence services, that Kissinger was working for the Soviets. I cannot attest to the veracity of such a wild accusation, especially one made by an odd figure like Goleniewski (who also claimed to be the direct descendant of the last czar of Russia), but I am struck by Kissinger's defensive remark to the charge:
I don't know who Colonel Goleniewski is, but I think he should be given the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Such a snide off-hand remark is problematic for Kissinger, who also worked in intelligence, and who had read numerous briefings, and is likely to have been aware of a man who was outing Soviet moles left and right in Europe. If Goleniewski's charges were the only spaghetti to stick to Kissinger's wall, so to speak, then one would say that our subject had escaped hot water. But there are other curious reasons to suspect Kissinger had ulterior motives with his often duplicitous policy positions, his favoritism for shady leftist characters (see Nyquist article above) and even an NSA intercept that supposedly shows that Kissinger revealed American operative in Russia "TRIGON" to Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin (this is presumably unverifiable). At the very least, I am perplexed about this "architect of detente," and his role in pushing America towards what the KGB called "universal convergence" with the communist superstates of Russia and China. To quote prominent counterintelligence analyst Leonard McCoy, ""Am I crazy to think this about Kissinger?"
But it appears that things are even worse than I first thought. Along comes an article, published today, admittedly by the hit-and-miss World Net Daily, entitled, "Kissinger: Obama primed to create 'New World Order'." In the balanced and moderately toned article, Kissinger praises Obama for his choice of advisers and just last year, Kissinger spoke openly of the opportunity he saw for creating a 'new world order' - out of international crisis.
Kissinger's sudden re-emergence onto the public scene is oddly timed considering Obama's own bizarre form of "detente" with the socialist and terrorist-sponsoring world.
When Obama's counter-productive domestic policies, prostrate foreign policy stance, and internationalist bent is taken together with the recent pronouncement of Russian president Dmitri Medvedev endorsing a "new world order," I'm sorry, but I'm starting to get spooked. As Medvedev, the hand-groomed successor of KGB officer Vladimir Putin, put it:
What had seemed untouchable has collapsed. The bubbles [ultimately created by the Federal Reserve and fiat currency - ed.] that created the illusion of flourishing economies have burst. For Russia this situation is a challenge and an opportunity. We are living in a unique time. And we should use it to build a modern, flourishing and strong Russia … which will be a co-founder of the new world economic order and a full participant in the collective political leadership of the post-crisis world.”
Kissinger couldn't have put it any better himself.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Obama the Radical: Exposing the Narrative of Naivete and the Insistence on Incompetence
President Barack Hussein Obama was called naive almost from the very instant he came onto the national political scene. He was called naive by his national election campaign opponents Hillary Clinton and John McCain. As president, he was called naive for his foreign policy views by various thinkers and politicians, including diplomats like former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife Liz Cheney, former Vice Presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman, former presidential adviser Ben Stein, Florida Senatorial candidate Marco Rubio, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, prominent commentator Charles Krauthammer, and others on issues ranging from Iran, to Israel, to Pakistan, to Russia, to terrorism, to abolishing nuclear weapons, to sanctions, to appeasing Muslims, to his Middle East policy, to Guantanamo Bay, for his approach to national security in general, and for his Cairo speech, his UN speech, his Berlin speech, and numerous other speeches. He was called naive for his domestic policy by former Clinton adviser James Carville, who slammed him for his handling of the BP oil spill, by Paul Krugman, and by countless other pundits on issues ranging from healthcare, the medical industry, on corporate power and influence, the economy, the budget deficit, bipartisanship, and for various other reasons (seeing as it was a key Republican strategy to paint Obama "naive" as such). The British newspaper The Telegraph even called Obama "the most naive president in U.S. history" and cited ten reasons why.
But who is really being naive here?
Obama was raised by radicals. Obama admits he chose his friends carefully and hung out with radicals. As a presidential candidate, he endorsed the quintessentially socialist policy of wealth redistribution. Upon being elected president, he appointed the most extreme radicals imaginable as Czars, that way they would not be accountable to the Senate for public confirmation. Obama appointed radical Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the highest court in the land. Obama shook hands and rubbed elbows with world renowned socialist dictators. Obama was cautiously endorsed by the Communist Party of the United States. Obama promised to fundamentally transform the United States, presumably from a capitalist system based on individual liberty to a more fascistic or socialist one (according to some socialist theories, fascism is the stage a capitalist society goes through during its "death throes"). As a legal scholar, he called the Constitution a flawed document. Since being elected, Obama has caused massive disruption to America's capitalist economy and foreign relations. Are we to believe he is so "naive" that he doesn't know that his patently radical agenda would conflict with America the way it was founded and how it has more or less operated for over 200 years? That his agenda would cause disruption and chaos? The narrative of naivete gives unwarranted points for good intentions to Obama based on assumptions whose proofs reside only in Obama's mind.
So why does the narrative of naivete persist?
Presumably since Obama is a black man, people are hesitant to condemn him publicly for fear of being branded a racist. Those who have played the 'racism card' against Obama's critics include politicians like former president Jimmy Carter, former president Bill Clinton, former presidential candidate Walter Mondale, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi and several others of the Democrat leadership, fairly respected journalists like New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, New Yorker editor David Remnick, network news anchors Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, and less seriously, pundits like Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and ironically, Chris Matthews, as well as "entertainers" like Janeane Garofalo, Dave Matthews, and Joy Behar, among countless others. Due to the mainstream media's constant, preemptive, instantaneous (see debunked), and occasionally comical insistence that any critics of President Obama are inherently racist, including those of the broad-based conservative opposition movement known as the tea party, one can only rationally conclude that playing the race card is an intentional strategy meant to defuse criticism of the president in general. It is political correctness being used as a cudgel to silence middle America. At times, pundits have even made a direct linkage, claiming that those who call Obama a "socialist" (an ideology) are by definition racist (which is based on an ascriptive criterion). The culture is so mucked up with such rhetoric, that out of social fear, hope that the nation's first black president will be successful, or simply a lack of clear thinking, many people refuse to admit that Obama is anything but naive. Many call him brilliant, a masterful campaigner, and Machiavellian, yet he remains to some the perpetually wet-behind-the-ears politician.
The primary rival to the narrative of naivete is the insistence that Obama is "incompetent." The espousers of this point of view are about as many as those that believe Obama is naive, and the sets often overlap. Although naivete and incompetence are two separate contentions, they are both related in that their invocation are mental dodges of giving Obama credit for knowing exactly what he is doing. While the narrative of naivete contends that Obama is inexperienced, unpolished, and unacquainted with how politics works in practice, and as such a product of his ivory tower education and community organizer work experience, the insistence of incompetence holds that the chaos and disruption that Obama has caused is due to the president's inability to measure up to the demands of the office, such as reigning in the bureaucracy and showing proper decorum while abroad.
But notice that the main criticisms of Obama are unrelated to his capacity to perform his job as Americans expect it, but rather that he is demonstrably unwilling to do it, and when afforded the opportunity, he carries out the polar opposite of what Americans believe to be successful policy. Is it "incompetent" to repeatedly bow to foreign dictators? Is it "incompetent" to apologize for America over and over again? Is it "incompetent" to alienate America's staunchest allies and embrace her traditional enemies? Is it "incompetent" to appoint radicals for office at every opportunity? Is it "incompetent" to continue pushing unsuccessful economic policies, such as "stimulus" packages, environmental regulations, and tax hikes, particularly when they have failed during one's own administration? What, specifically, is "incompetent" about Obama's behavior? Even the BP oil spill does not show an inability to manage the situation, but rather an unwillingness.
The murkiness regarding the settlement of the argument of whether Obama's actions are naive or incompetent or intentionally radical lay in the fact that all alternative explanations result in disruption and chaos in America (and especially since the government is becoming increasingly centralized). But nothing about Obama's actions suggests naivete or incompetence. A repeated pattern of disruptive and destructive economic, domestic, and foreign policies suggests an ideological bent that systematically disposes an actor to choose options that are anathema to the functioning of the system in place. It may be the case that the actor believes that he is helping the country "change" to a better, more just system, or that he is targeting the institutional bases that support the current system because he believes that they are unjust, or both. In any case, the fundamental reason that his ideological base (which predictably denies that Obama is a radical, a socialist, or Marxist, as scripted by Alinsky) will support the president regardless of how destructive his policies are is that, in their own point of view, anything is better than the shame and humiliation that America endured under the unpolished neoconservative George W. Bush. And the primary reason that African-Americans will support Obama regardless of what he does is the double reason that they are staunch and unwavering Democrat supporters and they have a psychical reason for the first black president to succeed, as it supposedly accrues to their own success or failure. The collectivist notion that one can accrue infamy or glory according to the coincidence of one roughly sharing the same skin color as another human being is so ingrained and airtight in the mindset of the public, it is virtually unassailable without instant and irrational ridicule and charges of racism.
There is another permutation, and one that a few have recently picked up on: That Obama is an incompetent radical. But this is a bit like trying to untie a Gordian knot. Since it is the object of the radical to cause chaos and even "crisis," how does one know if a radical's "incompetence" is intentional or otherwise? What if "incompetence" is merely a cover for intentionally destructive policies and a lack of concerted remedial action? We get into the realm of mind-reading with such allegations, but certainly we have far more evidence that Obama is a hostile radical than we have that he agrees with capitalism and Constitutional government and simply does not know what he is doing.
In my humble opinion, much of the mental conflict in Americans' minds appears to be a related to a Christian aversion to metaphysical judgment ("judge not lest ye be judged") and the belief that it is only fair to give a person the benefit of the doubt that he is innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, the evidence that would prove people wrong about Obama, that he is neither naive nor incompetent, but rather a radical intent on transforming America, presently resides only in Obama's "soul." An equally mystical point of view prevails among some untrained minds that the result of Obama's transformative program could potentially be beneficial to Americans and their way of life, if only Obama were given a chance by his critics (this view is a product of ignorance about history, the reasons America was founded as it was, and how the rest of the world works). Others take so narrow a view on what constitutes a socialist, that not even Trotsky or Lenin, let alone Obama, could live up to their own crafted definitions. Thus Obama is an "anything but" - neither a socialist, nor a fascist, nor a communist, perhaps not even a "radical," simply an "other" - an "alien in the White House."
Some, but far too few, have been fearless and wise enough to reconcile a rational assessment of Obama's record with present reality, have concluded that the destruction that Obama and the Democrats have caused to America as we know it is too systematic to be unintentional, and predictably, they have been publicly condemned for openly stating as such. It is time for more Americans to put aside their fear of others' judgment and their mystical deliberation on whether or not Obama is naive or incompetent and realize that he is what he says he is: A radical agent of "change" intent on transforming this nation. Could the implementation of a radical agenda of equality in the freest, most prosperous, most successful nation in the history of the world result in anything other than the unrelentingly destructive mess we see all around?
But who is really being naive here?
Obama was raised by radicals. Obama admits he chose his friends carefully and hung out with radicals. As a presidential candidate, he endorsed the quintessentially socialist policy of wealth redistribution. Upon being elected president, he appointed the most extreme radicals imaginable as Czars, that way they would not be accountable to the Senate for public confirmation. Obama appointed radical Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the highest court in the land. Obama shook hands and rubbed elbows with world renowned socialist dictators. Obama was cautiously endorsed by the Communist Party of the United States. Obama promised to fundamentally transform the United States, presumably from a capitalist system based on individual liberty to a more fascistic or socialist one (according to some socialist theories, fascism is the stage a capitalist society goes through during its "death throes"). As a legal scholar, he called the Constitution a flawed document. Since being elected, Obama has caused massive disruption to America's capitalist economy and foreign relations. Are we to believe he is so "naive" that he doesn't know that his patently radical agenda would conflict with America the way it was founded and how it has more or less operated for over 200 years? That his agenda would cause disruption and chaos? The narrative of naivete gives unwarranted points for good intentions to Obama based on assumptions whose proofs reside only in Obama's mind.
So why does the narrative of naivete persist?
Presumably since Obama is a black man, people are hesitant to condemn him publicly for fear of being branded a racist. Those who have played the 'racism card' against Obama's critics include politicians like former president Jimmy Carter, former president Bill Clinton, former presidential candidate Walter Mondale, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi and several others of the Democrat leadership, fairly respected journalists like New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, New Yorker editor David Remnick, network news anchors Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, and less seriously, pundits like Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and ironically, Chris Matthews, as well as "entertainers" like Janeane Garofalo, Dave Matthews, and Joy Behar, among countless others. Due to the mainstream media's constant, preemptive, instantaneous (see debunked), and occasionally comical insistence that any critics of President Obama are inherently racist, including those of the broad-based conservative opposition movement known as the tea party, one can only rationally conclude that playing the race card is an intentional strategy meant to defuse criticism of the president in general. It is political correctness being used as a cudgel to silence middle America. At times, pundits have even made a direct linkage, claiming that those who call Obama a "socialist" (an ideology) are by definition racist (which is based on an ascriptive criterion). The culture is so mucked up with such rhetoric, that out of social fear, hope that the nation's first black president will be successful, or simply a lack of clear thinking, many people refuse to admit that Obama is anything but naive. Many call him brilliant, a masterful campaigner, and Machiavellian, yet he remains to some the perpetually wet-behind-the-ears politician.
The primary rival to the narrative of naivete is the insistence that Obama is "incompetent." The espousers of this point of view are about as many as those that believe Obama is naive, and the sets often overlap. Although naivete and incompetence are two separate contentions, they are both related in that their invocation are mental dodges of giving Obama credit for knowing exactly what he is doing. While the narrative of naivete contends that Obama is inexperienced, unpolished, and unacquainted with how politics works in practice, and as such a product of his ivory tower education and community organizer work experience, the insistence of incompetence holds that the chaos and disruption that Obama has caused is due to the president's inability to measure up to the demands of the office, such as reigning in the bureaucracy and showing proper decorum while abroad.
But notice that the main criticisms of Obama are unrelated to his capacity to perform his job as Americans expect it, but rather that he is demonstrably unwilling to do it, and when afforded the opportunity, he carries out the polar opposite of what Americans believe to be successful policy. Is it "incompetent" to repeatedly bow to foreign dictators? Is it "incompetent" to apologize for America over and over again? Is it "incompetent" to alienate America's staunchest allies and embrace her traditional enemies? Is it "incompetent" to appoint radicals for office at every opportunity? Is it "incompetent" to continue pushing unsuccessful economic policies, such as "stimulus" packages, environmental regulations, and tax hikes, particularly when they have failed during one's own administration? What, specifically, is "incompetent" about Obama's behavior? Even the BP oil spill does not show an inability to manage the situation, but rather an unwillingness.
The murkiness regarding the settlement of the argument of whether Obama's actions are naive or incompetent or intentionally radical lay in the fact that all alternative explanations result in disruption and chaos in America (and especially since the government is becoming increasingly centralized). But nothing about Obama's actions suggests naivete or incompetence. A repeated pattern of disruptive and destructive economic, domestic, and foreign policies suggests an ideological bent that systematically disposes an actor to choose options that are anathema to the functioning of the system in place. It may be the case that the actor believes that he is helping the country "change" to a better, more just system, or that he is targeting the institutional bases that support the current system because he believes that they are unjust, or both. In any case, the fundamental reason that his ideological base (which predictably denies that Obama is a radical, a socialist, or Marxist, as scripted by Alinsky) will support the president regardless of how destructive his policies are is that, in their own point of view, anything is better than the shame and humiliation that America endured under the unpolished neoconservative George W. Bush. And the primary reason that African-Americans will support Obama regardless of what he does is the double reason that they are staunch and unwavering Democrat supporters and they have a psychical reason for the first black president to succeed, as it supposedly accrues to their own success or failure. The collectivist notion that one can accrue infamy or glory according to the coincidence of one roughly sharing the same skin color as another human being is so ingrained and airtight in the mindset of the public, it is virtually unassailable without instant and irrational ridicule and charges of racism.
There is another permutation, and one that a few have recently picked up on: That Obama is an incompetent radical. But this is a bit like trying to untie a Gordian knot. Since it is the object of the radical to cause chaos and even "crisis," how does one know if a radical's "incompetence" is intentional or otherwise? What if "incompetence" is merely a cover for intentionally destructive policies and a lack of concerted remedial action? We get into the realm of mind-reading with such allegations, but certainly we have far more evidence that Obama is a hostile radical than we have that he agrees with capitalism and Constitutional government and simply does not know what he is doing.
In my humble opinion, much of the mental conflict in Americans' minds appears to be a related to a Christian aversion to metaphysical judgment ("judge not lest ye be judged") and the belief that it is only fair to give a person the benefit of the doubt that he is innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, the evidence that would prove people wrong about Obama, that he is neither naive nor incompetent, but rather a radical intent on transforming America, presently resides only in Obama's "soul." An equally mystical point of view prevails among some untrained minds that the result of Obama's transformative program could potentially be beneficial to Americans and their way of life, if only Obama were given a chance by his critics (this view is a product of ignorance about history, the reasons America was founded as it was, and how the rest of the world works). Others take so narrow a view on what constitutes a socialist, that not even Trotsky or Lenin, let alone Obama, could live up to their own crafted definitions. Thus Obama is an "anything but" - neither a socialist, nor a fascist, nor a communist, perhaps not even a "radical," simply an "other" - an "alien in the White House."
Some, but far too few, have been fearless and wise enough to reconcile a rational assessment of Obama's record with present reality, have concluded that the destruction that Obama and the Democrats have caused to America as we know it is too systematic to be unintentional, and predictably, they have been publicly condemned for openly stating as such. It is time for more Americans to put aside their fear of others' judgment and their mystical deliberation on whether or not Obama is naive or incompetent and realize that he is what he says he is: A radical agent of "change" intent on transforming this nation. Could the implementation of a radical agenda of equality in the freest, most prosperous, most successful nation in the history of the world result in anything other than the unrelentingly destructive mess we see all around?
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Rule, Britannia! Rule the Waves! Britons Never Shall Be Slaves
Britannia Rules In the 18th century, Great Britain was the predominant global center of science and philosophy. By the mid-19th century, it was by far the most powerful and wealthiest country. Its empire was the largest-ever in history - by the 20th century it spanned about a quarter of the globe's population and territory. The Industrial Revolution began in Britain and was proceeding at a breakneck pace. The tiny island accounted for almost half of the world's industrial output, two thirds of global coal production and three quarters of the world's steel output. Britain owned half of the world's ocean-going ships and half of the world's railway mileage. About 40% of the world's trade passed through British ports. The British pound was the global currency, and the London Stock Exchange was the largest in the world.
Britannia Sucks
A century later, the picture was quite different. Wartime food rationing in the UK was not abolished until 1954, later than the rest of Western Europe - a sign of an impoverished and ailing society. Runaway inflation peaked at 27% in 1975. Unemployment got out of control. By 1976, Britain became Protestant Europe's poorest country and the second-poorest country in the European Community. It ranked 29th in terms of GDP per capita, slightly above Italy, Spain, and Portugal. The UK's GDP, once the world's largest, had now dropped not only below that of the US and France but also of the vanquished foes - Germany and Japan. Its economic growth rate lagged behind that of most other West European countries. London was no longer the world’s preeminent financial hub, with investors fleeing to New York.
Britain was now "the sick man of Europe." At that time, the UK became the first OECD country to apply for an IMF loan, relegating itself to the level of Third-World countries - a humiliating experience, to say the least, for a country that used to rule the world. "Britain is a tragedy - it has sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing," Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said then, calling the UK a "scrounger" and a "disgrace."
Trade unions, which was a euphemism for criminal gangs using state-authorized and private coercion to bully both businessmen and workers, reached the height of their power, ousting governments and getting away with almost everything. The trend peaked during the Winter of Discontent (1978-1979), when strikes all over the country paralyzed the entire economy. Public services were almost shut down, piles of rubbish and corpses lay on the streets because of public-sector strikes, and electricity shortages were omnipresent.
The British Empire collapsed overnight, with colonial savages looting the wealth invested by British citizens with impunity (that was given the benign-sounding name of "nationalization", of course). By 1982, the United Kingdom, whose naval power used to surpass that of other great powers combined, degraded to the point when the tinpot dictator of a banana republic invaded sovereign British territory and was absolutely confident he would get away with it. Great Britain turned from a superpower into a second-rate or even third-rate country.
Moreover, Britain fell victim to an enormous brain drain. The best minds were crossing the ocean to the country where scientific freedom still remained. The UK had long ago lost the position of the world's philosophic center to Germany and was now being replaced by the US as the predominant scientific hub.
The causes of Britain's unprecedented greatness in the 19th century and its unbelievable decline in the 20th are quite clear. Britain is the birthplace of modern constitutional government, Magna Carta, habeas corpus and Lockean liberalism. In the mid-19th century, Britain was the foremost champion of laissez-faire agenda (along with the US). It was the world's only country with a consistently free-trade policy (even the US then fell prey to protectionism). Property rights were more secure than ever before.
By the mid-20th century, what once was a free economy turned into its opposite. The UK kept wartime price controls and regulations well into the 1950s, becoming Western Europe's only peacetime planned economy. Most prices were set by the government and most essential resources were state-allocated. According to Ludwig von Mises, in fundamental terms such an economy was emphatically not a market economy and did not differ from Soviet socialism, despite retaining a fiction of private ownership, which was a mere facade. "In matters of economic planning we agree with Soviet Russia," Clement Attlee said in 1946, marking perhaps the lowest ebb in the UK's intellectual collapse.
In the 1940s Britain was acquiring a quasi-totalitarian flavor reflected in George Orwell's immortal magnum opus, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Though Britain was still far from such slaughterhouses as Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, they all shared such features as total state control over the economy and war hysteria. The U.K. Ministry of Information (MOI) with its absurd quest for censorship was an inspiration for Orwell's Ministry of Truth. In 1943 Orwell criticized wartime censorship in an article titled the Freedom of the Press. The height of MOI idiocy was its attempt to suppress all anti-Soviet sentiments and promote a pro-Soviet attitude in the media.
Though the planned economy was eventually abandoned in the 1950s as disaster followed disaster, by the late 1970s the British government nationalized perhaps more industries than any other West European country, turning the UK into a mixed economy where the government owned the "commanding heights" - something akin to Soviet Russia's New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1920s and China's post-Deng Xiaoping "socialist market economy."
Unlike China and Russia, the British economy was burdened with yet another malignant tumor - the welfare state, which was growing rapidly since 1945 and was only surpassed by Scandinavia. The UK's National Health Service, established in 1948, is one of Europe's most centralized and socialized healthcare systems. In Britain, there are much fewer private hospitals than in Continental Europe (excluding Scandinavia), and the share of public funding for healthcare is among the highest (along with Scandinavian countries).
The cultural collapse was also proceeding unchecked. An image of Britain's culture at that time can be found in Anthony Burgess' Clockwork Orange, a novel featuring an anarchic society of roaming proto-hippie hooligans adopting Soviet lingo and pursuing meaningless, moronic lives. Meanwhile, the intellectual elite was getting rotten as an inflow of state subsidies and grants turned science and philosophy into a nest of charlatans and rent seekers.
Cool Britannia
In 1979 something happened that drastically changed the downward trend. By the early 2000s the UK’s GDP per capita was higher than those of France and Germany, while its total GDP exceeded that of France and some speculated that it was poised to overtake Germany’s. The UK became Europe’s fastest-growing economy and the world’s second largest services exporter. Inflation and unemployment fell drastically. Moreover, as a result of the Big Bang deregulation policy and the idiotic Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the U.S., London again became the world’s financial capital.
By winning the Falklands War and playing a major part in the Soviet Union’s collapse, the UK reasserted its international reputation and demonstrated that it still could stand up to aggressors. Along with the U.S. president and the CPSU’s General Secretary, the prime minister of the UK was part of the great triumvirate that ran things around the world. The UK became what came to be known as “cool Britannia” (a pun on “Rule Britannia”).
So, what brought about the change?
To be continued.
The Corruption of a Free Republic
We pay taxes on property. We pay them on income. We pay them on sales. We pay them to live. We pay them when we die. Let's face it - the government owns us.
What the United States has now is not a government of, by, or for the people. The government is an interest as clearly as is any for-profit corporation. Yet a corporation must create and produce goods and services in order to be sustained. The government has no such constraints.
The government, whose production is coercion, exists for the benefit of those in power and at our expense. Its machinery is given life by capital, which represents our blood and sweat. It is driven by power and lubricated by greed.
This nature of government was not lost on those who founded this nation. Precautions were taken to forestall the government's transformation into a weapon to be wielded for the benefit of an exclusive political elite.
But a government is ultimately made up of self-interested men, who may narrowly pursue personal power at the long-term expense of the conditions that provide them such power. This is the root cause of the rise and decline of civilizations. Self-interest, when unguided by reason, is corrupted.
What is government? At its best, it is a resource that promotes the conditions that allow men to freely lead their lives - to create, to produce, to trade the fruit of their labor in kind facilitated by capital. The conditions of a free people are entirely encapsulated by the security of persons and property.
At its worst, government is a tool of men to force people to do or not do particular actions. The more particular the law, the more liable it is to be the instrument of particular interest. Over time, corrupt politicians tend to enact laws that benefit their personal interest, and to suppress behavior that threatens such interest.
The laws proliferate as the government becomes more corrupt. It has been estimated that there are now over two million laws in the United States. It is such a time, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, that it is impossible for a good man to live without being a criminal. As Frederic Bastiat observed:
Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim - when he defends himself - as a criminal.
If government is a tool of men, then which men are most fit to rule? This is the question on which the fate of a people rests. Only the elites and their dependents believe that the answer is an aristocracy. The great majority of the American people believe the answer is the people, in other words, a democracy. These are wrong answers. Self-government, or government of the individual, is the most superior form of government. But this is also the most precarious form and the most difficult to maintain, as it requires reason, morality, and self-sufficiency. Unsurprisingly, these qualities are enemies of the corrupt government.
The symbiotic relationship that perverts a society arises when the people's capacity for self-government deteriorates as politicians abuse the law to paternalistically accrue power and glory. The capacity for a system of laws to be sustained is undermined, and eventually the entire rotting edifice of the structure collapses.
Crisis provides social engineers the license to complete their reconstruction of society to their own benefit; and indeed, one finds that the authoritarian kernel of the transformative state had been embedded in the society generations before, like an acorn that grows ever-so-slowly into a mighty oak, and whose branches are clipped to form the fasces of despotic power for a tyrant.
A complete despotism is rarely, if ever, imposed against the will of a people. The sad fact of history is that authoritarian governments arise when people are prepared by the government to desire subjugation and are driven by necessity to beg for sustenance at the feet of their masters.
The hallmark of a government that is undermining the capacity of a people for self-government is the altruistic claim that the people must be saved from themselves. Such a government, through taxation and welfare, remedies victimhood by creating more victims. By siding with the failures of the society over those who succeed on their own, the government incentivizes and multiplies failure.
A great civilization filled with great men is thus overtaken by those of the mob, who have surrendered their lives to the state. Those whose lives are empty are filled up by those whose lives are overflowing until the life-blood of a society is drained. A free people is corrupted from within and then enslaved.
It may be said in Biblical terms that the devil does not destroy, he desecrates. Lucifer takes that which is beautiful and puts it in the service of evil. Just as the devil has no capacity for creation, those who seek to undermine our nation are not destroyers, they are corrupters. If shot through that prism, only the light of truth can vanquish them. And only morality, reason, and adherence to principle can sustain us.
What the United States has now is not a government of, by, or for the people. The government is an interest as clearly as is any for-profit corporation. Yet a corporation must create and produce goods and services in order to be sustained. The government has no such constraints.
The government, whose production is coercion, exists for the benefit of those in power and at our expense. Its machinery is given life by capital, which represents our blood and sweat. It is driven by power and lubricated by greed.
This nature of government was not lost on those who founded this nation. Precautions were taken to forestall the government's transformation into a weapon to be wielded for the benefit of an exclusive political elite.
But a government is ultimately made up of self-interested men, who may narrowly pursue personal power at the long-term expense of the conditions that provide them such power. This is the root cause of the rise and decline of civilizations. Self-interest, when unguided by reason, is corrupted.
What is government? At its best, it is a resource that promotes the conditions that allow men to freely lead their lives - to create, to produce, to trade the fruit of their labor in kind facilitated by capital. The conditions of a free people are entirely encapsulated by the security of persons and property.
At its worst, government is a tool of men to force people to do or not do particular actions. The more particular the law, the more liable it is to be the instrument of particular interest. Over time, corrupt politicians tend to enact laws that benefit their personal interest, and to suppress behavior that threatens such interest.
The laws proliferate as the government becomes more corrupt. It has been estimated that there are now over two million laws in the United States. It is such a time, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, that it is impossible for a good man to live without being a criminal. As Frederic Bastiat observed:
Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim - when he defends himself - as a criminal.
If government is a tool of men, then which men are most fit to rule? This is the question on which the fate of a people rests. Only the elites and their dependents believe that the answer is an aristocracy. The great majority of the American people believe the answer is the people, in other words, a democracy. These are wrong answers. Self-government, or government of the individual, is the most superior form of government. But this is also the most precarious form and the most difficult to maintain, as it requires reason, morality, and self-sufficiency. Unsurprisingly, these qualities are enemies of the corrupt government.
The symbiotic relationship that perverts a society arises when the people's capacity for self-government deteriorates as politicians abuse the law to paternalistically accrue power and glory. The capacity for a system of laws to be sustained is undermined, and eventually the entire rotting edifice of the structure collapses.
Crisis provides social engineers the license to complete their reconstruction of society to their own benefit; and indeed, one finds that the authoritarian kernel of the transformative state had been embedded in the society generations before, like an acorn that grows ever-so-slowly into a mighty oak, and whose branches are clipped to form the fasces of despotic power for a tyrant.
A complete despotism is rarely, if ever, imposed against the will of a people. The sad fact of history is that authoritarian governments arise when people are prepared by the government to desire subjugation and are driven by necessity to beg for sustenance at the feet of their masters.
The hallmark of a government that is undermining the capacity of a people for self-government is the altruistic claim that the people must be saved from themselves. Such a government, through taxation and welfare, remedies victimhood by creating more victims. By siding with the failures of the society over those who succeed on their own, the government incentivizes and multiplies failure.
A great civilization filled with great men is thus overtaken by those of the mob, who have surrendered their lives to the state. Those whose lives are empty are filled up by those whose lives are overflowing until the life-blood of a society is drained. A free people is corrupted from within and then enslaved.
It may be said in Biblical terms that the devil does not destroy, he desecrates. Lucifer takes that which is beautiful and puts it in the service of evil. Just as the devil has no capacity for creation, those who seek to undermine our nation are not destroyers, they are corrupters. If shot through that prism, only the light of truth can vanquish them. And only morality, reason, and adherence to principle can sustain us.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
The Left's Three-Headed Hydra Rips Obama to Shreds
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Respect My Authoritah | ||||
| ||||
First, Olbermouth and Tingles slam Obama for his lame-ass Carteresque speech, now Jon Stewart is ripping the One to shreds on national security policy. Is the end near for Obama's free pass in the major media?
President Obama and his Merry Band of Glory Whores Seize on BP Crisis
First off, BP has its own claims process, which it had been running for weeks before the White House indicated that it will take the claims process away and "make BP pay"! Of course it will pay, but it takes time to process claims in order to prevent fraud, which was absolutely rampant after Hurricane Katrina. BP actually cares about preventing waste and fraud, unlike the politicians who enjoy glory-whoring on the taxpayer dime.
Second, aren't other parties, like Haliburton and Transocean, potentially implicated?
Third, don't we have class action suits and legal settlements specifically for the purpose of handling externalities that arise from civil negligence?
Fourth, if the oil spill was an accident, and the offshore rig Deep Horizon was not only certified by the administration but given an award for safety excellence, doesn't that preclude talk of criminal negligence, or even, to stretch the argument, implicate the government as criminally negligent or even an accomplice?
Fifth, instead of watching the disaster get worse for weeks, wasn't it the responsibility of the President Obama and his administration to intervene expediently to prevent further damage to the Gulf waters? After all, why else do we have the worthless Environmental Protection Agency, the hapless Federal Emergency Management Agency, and a Coast Guard but to protect America from such disasters? But apparently agencies like the EPA exist for little else but to collect fees and fines, if not to stifle the economy with regulations.
There are many questions surrounding the oil spill, and billions of dollars at stake for BP and the American economy. Yet once again the president sees fit to run his mouth before knowing all the facts.
Just like with Professor Gates and the white police officer who "acted stupidly," the president proclaims guilt according to his ideological pre-conceptions (in this case, the evil corporation BP is obviously completely to blame).
And just like when the president stated emphatically prior to the KSM trial that the 911 co-conspirator would be convicted and would be put to death, the president shows either a fundamental disconnect with how the legal system works in a free country or a chilling willingness to impede due process and impose his political preferences against the rule of law.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Obama Declares BP Oil Spill 'Like 911'
But the modus operandi of the Community Organizer-in-Chief to accrue political capital with Chicago street thug tactics is beginning to backfire.
The president's falling approval numbers suggest that many of his last remaining allies are defecting in droves. Obama's political acumen throughout the BP spill disaster has been so flawed that he has only convincingly shown solidarity with those who are guaranteed not to come to his aid - the dead ocean creatures who litter the gulf. (In a maneuver that only Rahm "dead fish" Emanuel could appreciate: Maybe the gulf spill is a message to Americans on what the Democrats plan to do the oil industry? But I digress.)
Obama has shown a remarkable lack of political savvy of late, irritating environmentalists with his uncaring demeanor toward the plight of the oceans, conservatives with his lack of capacity for action and leadership, and now the victims of a notorious attack on domestic soil with his lack of sensitivity and detachment from the event's pathos in the American weltanschauung.
In an impromptu (a fancy term for off-teleprompter) moment the ever-so-eloquent Obama recently stated that the BP oil spill was 'like 911.' Like 911? For whom? The fish?
Understandably, Obama's psychically disconnected gaffe infuriated the Brits, who now want the president, along with us Americans, to give his considerable yap a rest. Melanie Phillips, in her article It's the gushing geyser of Obama's anti-British rhetoric that now urgently needs to be capped, relayed our president's half-hearted apology: "Obama said he never meant to undermine BP, and the affair had nothing to do with national identity."
But that's the beauty of being an international socialist - one's intentions are never held in question, one's attention to something so parochial as national politics need never be pressed, and all that need be advanced is the end goal of pure, undiluted anti-capitalism. So we shouldn't be surprised that Obama the radical community organizer is milking the BP crisis for all that he can get - the power to pass punitive new taxes, to enact stringent new regulations in the energy sector, to obstinately push the unwanted cap-and-tax policy.
With his radical leftist agenda, it is Obama himself who is polluting the international environment more than BP could ever dream. There is something dark and oily oozing all right, it just happens to be the sinister politics emanating from Washington. We Americans do need to put a cap on it, and not coincidentally, that looks like it will also happen around November.
The End for the American Hegemon: Circling the Last Helicopters
Mark Steyn made an observation on the Dennis Miller Show the day after the Obamacare debacle was set in stone that the establishment of a government-run healthcare system meant that the good old days of America underwriting global security would soon be over. And sure enough, rumblings to slash the scope of military commitments and thereby reduce governmental expenses, only to free up cash to be scooped up by the incoming national health service, are already upon us.
Who could guess that the end of American hegemony - its status as sole superpower - would be brought about not by a red dawn but rather by two thousand papercuts garnered from a healthcare bill whose contents are only beginning to shock and horrify the American people?
One of the signalers of the sea change from Team America: World Police to a pacifist neo-isolationist nanny state has come from an unusual corner of the Interwebs - the iconically libertarian CATO Institute. Chris Preble of CATO co-wrote an article in Politico calling for cutting military expenditures that caught the attention of banking queen Barney Frank, who lapped it up like one of his Puerto Rican houseboys. As Preble's CATO article How to Cut Military Spending explains, it linked America's "economic health" to its ability to sustain military expenditures, implying that it may be time for the United States to scale back and draw down. Congressman Frank immediately picked up the ball and ran, establishing an eerily named "Sustainable Defense Task Force" that drafted a report Debt, Deficits, and Defense describing how to deconstruct our military.
Don't get me wrong - I am completely sympathetic to the argument that we should reduce the burden on the American people for providing security for the globe. Many of the same states that free ride on Americans' willingness to fight true evil around the world, such as communism and now radical Islam, have been the first ones to criticize the United States for all manner of concocted infractions against "human rights." This includes countries like France, Britain, and Germany who directly benefited from American participation in NATO and other postwar organizations. It certainly is time to stop subsidizing the Europeans' socialist experiments - but my objection to those who argue to do so now is that the reason should not be to run a failed social experiment of our own.
That is why libertarians, who may certainly mean well enough in asking other nations to pay their own fair share for ensuring international security, should not partner with liberals who have opposite reasons for making an argument for American retraction. Not only do liberals want to see American influence weakened for its own sake, and many because the U.S. has until recently been a strong capitalist country that has "corrupted" the world order with its shining example of the success of liberty and economic freedom, they want to cut the military simply to free up funds to blow on demented social engineering programs.
The liberals may be right that America is in decline. They should know, they have helped to bring it about since the 1960s. As libertarian Christopher Preble wrote in a separate article "Fiscal Imbalance and Global Power":
"Our long-term fiscal imbalance, which increasingly amounts to a massive intergenerational wealth transfer, is clearly a sign of our decline. But it is a decline that has been a long time coming."
And the timing of the calls to reduce the scope of our military responsibility should give a libertarian pause. It may be said that "the enemy of our enemy is our friend," but there are other enemies to consider besides adventurist neocons who are intent on abusing American military power to accomplish vague political agendas across the globe. The questionable and at times bizarre actions of President Obama suggest that American decline is more than being "managed," it is being not-too-subtly prodded along. Waiting in the Eurasian wings, that grand chessboard of geopolitics, are the predatory states of Russia and China.
It should be said that although Obama has been surprisingly staunch in his willingness to maintain American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan (to the objections of only a few of the hardiest whimpering pacifists), his strength in terms of how the "overseas contingency operations" are being run has been less than impressive. Weak ROEs, the prosecution of terrorist-punching soldiers, and a childish testiness about nomenclature suggest that Obama's foreign policy sympathies may be, let's say, non-traditional.
The conditions under which the United States withdraws from the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are crucial - there should be no "last helicopters" out of the Middle East to taint the image of America's willingness to oppose its enemies no matter where they are. But if America retreats from its international commitments in a position of weakness, even economic weakness, this will only encourage its enemies and adversaries to act more aggressively against its interests. The U.S. indeed should have withdrawn from or scaled back its commitments abroad, a long time ago, before it ran up hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, and before the Europeans, the Japanese, and the South Koreans became attached to the post-Cold War gravy train.
The hard lesson that goes unsaid in CATO's articles, and one that would not be missed at say, The Mises Institute, is that our fiscal policy has been a house founded on sand since the monetary system became total fiat in 1971. Not only did the transitory power of the Fed's printing press seductively lure the American people into an illusory impression of the condition of the nation's finances, it did the same for the sustainability of the respective finances of the nation-states of Europe. There may indeed be last helicopters out of Eurasia, but it won't be our troops fleeing some desert hell-hole; they will be piloted by "helicopter Ben" and his spendthrift minions at the Fed.
Who could guess that the end of American hegemony - its status as sole superpower - would be brought about not by a red dawn but rather by two thousand papercuts garnered from a healthcare bill whose contents are only beginning to shock and horrify the American people?
Don't get me wrong - I am completely sympathetic to the argument that we should reduce the burden on the American people for providing security for the globe. Many of the same states that free ride on Americans' willingness to fight true evil around the world, such as communism and now radical Islam, have been the first ones to criticize the United States for all manner of concocted infractions against "human rights." This includes countries like France, Britain, and Germany who directly benefited from American participation in NATO and other postwar organizations. It certainly is time to stop subsidizing the Europeans' socialist experiments - but my objection to those who argue to do so now is that the reason should not be to run a failed social experiment of our own.
That is why libertarians, who may certainly mean well enough in asking other nations to pay their own fair share for ensuring international security, should not partner with liberals who have opposite reasons for making an argument for American retraction. Not only do liberals want to see American influence weakened for its own sake, and many because the U.S. has until recently been a strong capitalist country that has "corrupted" the world order with its shining example of the success of liberty and economic freedom, they want to cut the military simply to free up funds to blow on demented social engineering programs.
The liberals may be right that America is in decline. They should know, they have helped to bring it about since the 1960s. As libertarian Christopher Preble wrote in a separate article "Fiscal Imbalance and Global Power":
"Our long-term fiscal imbalance, which increasingly amounts to a massive intergenerational wealth transfer, is clearly a sign of our decline. But it is a decline that has been a long time coming."
And the timing of the calls to reduce the scope of our military responsibility should give a libertarian pause. It may be said that "the enemy of our enemy is our friend," but there are other enemies to consider besides adventurist neocons who are intent on abusing American military power to accomplish vague political agendas across the globe. The questionable and at times bizarre actions of President Obama suggest that American decline is more than being "managed," it is being not-too-subtly prodded along. Waiting in the Eurasian wings, that grand chessboard of geopolitics, are the predatory states of Russia and China.
It should be said that although Obama has been surprisingly staunch in his willingness to maintain American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan (to the objections of only a few of the hardiest whimpering pacifists), his strength in terms of how the "overseas contingency operations" are being run has been less than impressive. Weak ROEs, the prosecution of terrorist-punching soldiers, and a childish testiness about nomenclature suggest that Obama's foreign policy sympathies may be, let's say, non-traditional.
The conditions under which the United States withdraws from the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are crucial - there should be no "last helicopters" out of the Middle East to taint the image of America's willingness to oppose its enemies no matter where they are. But if America retreats from its international commitments in a position of weakness, even economic weakness, this will only encourage its enemies and adversaries to act more aggressively against its interests. The U.S. indeed should have withdrawn from or scaled back its commitments abroad, a long time ago, before it ran up hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, and before the Europeans, the Japanese, and the South Koreans became attached to the post-Cold War gravy train.
The hard lesson that goes unsaid in CATO's articles, and one that would not be missed at say, The Mises Institute, is that our fiscal policy has been a house founded on sand since the monetary system became total fiat in 1971. Not only did the transitory power of the Fed's printing press seductively lure the American people into an illusory impression of the condition of the nation's finances, it did the same for the sustainability of the respective finances of the nation-states of Europe. There may indeed be last helicopters out of Eurasia, but it won't be our troops fleeing some desert hell-hole; they will be piloted by "helicopter Ben" and his spendthrift minions at the Fed.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Obama's NSS: American Leadership by Emulation, Accommodation, and Capitulation
The Obama administration's National Security Strategy memo (afterward NSS) is an incomprehensible blend of propaganda written to foster a certain image of the president as a multicultural everyman mixed up with a smattering of the interests and "strategies" the American executive actually seeks to advance. And I use the term "strategies" generously, since it is unclear where the Obama administration's "shoulds" meet up with the "hows."
While the NSS states bluntly, in Alinskyite language, that "we must face the world as it is," this admonishment was apparently lost on the coterie of bureaucrats and academics who drafted the memo. In the NSS, the Obama administration claims to support democracy (like in Honduras and in Iran?), value for the individual (like funneling everyone into Obamacare?), and human rights (like in China?), while at the same time the document is strewn with enough of the usual Marxist memes about addressing economic inequality as a source of conflict (a significant proportion of terrorists and other radicals are wealthy and Western-educated) and remedying such supposedly capitalist bugaboos as manmade climate change that the document comes off as muddled, weak, dishonest, and an attempt to be all things to all people.
Reflecting the administration who drafted it, the NSS is simply schizophrenic in its claims to moral leadership and its amoral view of international relations. The memo is laden with obfuscation intended to half-veil the designs of the administration to transition America from a sovereign, capitalist nation founded on individual liberty into an engine for international wealth redistribution to address economic inequality, the theoretical source of all evil in the Marxist worldview.
The NSS is simply rife with unblinking platitudes, such as in President Obama's juvenile intro that "security will come not from our ability to instill fear in other peoples, but through our capacity to speak to their hopes." Is our commander-in-chief so naive that he really thinks that we can deter enemies in the long-term simply by being congenial? Are we to inspire 'hope' in foreign peoples by perpetually hitting up American taxpayers to fund hapless, clueless, and corrupt international organizations to fight over-hyped chimeras like manmade climate change, and on behalf of abstract ideals with no measurement of victory and no hope of resolution?
What renders the NSS memo incomprehensible as a guide for analysts to predict America's actions in the future is its lip service to American ideals like individualism and "democracy" (I take severe umbrage with this terminology - individual rights are what makes Western life desirable, not the institutions that preserve them), while claiming that we "share values" with states throughout Europe, Asia, the Americas, and including the socialist, dictatorial, communist, and Islamic regimes. This is utter nonsense and a mental disconnect with reality indicative of the cultural relativism and moral nihilism that have infested the intellectual class. While the NSS claims we need to "renew" our moral leadership in the world, we are apparently to do that by "engaging" every country ad infinitum, fettering ourselves further under international institutions, and by acting like every other failed state-led paternalistic economy in the world.
Beyond the NSS' risible strategy of "leading" through submission to the will of the disparate states of the world, there is the matter that a state lacks credibility when its moralizing is not backed up by its actions. Who would we be to lecture the PIIIGs of Europe about fiscal austerity? Who are we to advocate respect for the rule of law, when our administration tramples the Constitution with such actions as nationalizing GM, and mocks 'democracy' by passing the despicable healthcare legislation against the clear will of the American people? Such mixed messages strike me, and presumably the "world community," as dishonest, amateurish, designed to obfuscate, and unserious.
But as much as the message the NSS sends to the world cannot be taken seriously, in light of the actual consensus of people and disinterested scientists that manmade climate change is a scam, that the avian and swine flu "pandemics" were WHO-led frauds, and that what threatens international security most pressingly is the rise of a nuclear Iran and wmd-laden terrorist organizations, the message to the American people is perhaps even more ambiguous, incredible, and at points, foreboding.
While the NSS speaks of reclaiming the mantle of global leadership through education and innovation, there is no acknowledgment of the conditions that actually promote excellence in those endeavors. One apparently must make the tacit assumption that these things will happen if only the government wills it; this is the assumption of failed statist programs around the world. America rose to the top in university-level education and in terms of scientific innovation through market competition, choice, and entrepreneurial incentives. This administration has done nothing to address the lack of ideological diversity in the already conformist university system, has consolidated (by stealth) government student loans and grants, has supported further control over public education through teacher's unions and the DOE, has denied even charter school funding in D.C., has all but obliterated entrepreneurial incentives through imposing potentially crushing healthcare insurance burdens and by threatening taxes, such as VAT and the eclipse of the Bush tax cuts for "the rich" (which includes the working class and small business owners). Any notion that the Obama administration will actually accomplish the supposed goal of leading in education and innovation with more statist programs would be more laughable if it weren't also hopelessly delusional.
In addition to the tragicomic effect of the NSS punctuating lofty goals with futile strategies, there are also clear warnings to the American people about the intentions of this administration that should not be missed. The most foreboding passage in the NSS that I came across (prefaced by a statement about "commitment to deficit reduction"!) that Americans should be concerned about:
"These steps complement our efforts to integrate homeland security with national security; including seamless coordination among Federal, state, and local governments to prevent, protect against, and respond to threats and natural disasters." (2)
It is absolutely vital that Americans oppose such "integration" of security services, for without a shadow of a doubt, such designs are the harbinger of a police state. States' internal security, such as the state police and national guard, and the federal government's internal and foreign security organs must be decoupled and placed under competing authorities. The argument that centralization and consolidation means efficiency is not borne out by evidence; communication and redundancy, while imaginatively utilizing new technology, can shore up many of the problems that stem from the decentralization of police, security, defense, and intelligence authorities.
In contradistinction to the NSS, America needs to advance its moral leadership in opposition to the statist, socialist, and Islamist states of the world. We need to stand by allies with whom we truly share the values of "democracy" and individual rights. We need to defeat terrorists abroad using aggressive techniques meant to inspire fear in our enemies, while avoiding over-expansion, tremendous financial and human costs, and open-ended "development" and democratization projects. Ironically, democracy in pure form can be destabilizing and gives form to the ideological dispositions of the culture it purports to represent. Eliding our ideological differences with our adversaries is not facing the world as it is. Acknowledging that enemies like Iran and North Korea and adversaries like Russia and China are not as easily misled by platitudes, signaling, propaganda, and token overtures as the American people were during President Obama's election campaign requires a determination to show real leadership and a commitment to action. As we have seen with this administration time and again, its claims to leadership have been all rhetoric and no reality.
See also:
Overview of 2010 National Security Strategy
Paralyzing American Power by Gary Johnson, Jr. in American Thinker
National Security Strategy 2010: No Clear Path by Austin Knuppe at Long War Journal
The National Security Strategy of 2010. Or 2006. Or Whatever. by Max Boot at Commentary magazine
While the NSS states bluntly, in Alinskyite language, that "we must face the world as it is," this admonishment was apparently lost on the coterie of bureaucrats and academics who drafted the memo. In the NSS, the Obama administration claims to support democracy (like in Honduras and in Iran?), value for the individual (like funneling everyone into Obamacare?), and human rights (like in China?), while at the same time the document is strewn with enough of the usual Marxist memes about addressing economic inequality as a source of conflict (a significant proportion of terrorists and other radicals are wealthy and Western-educated) and remedying such supposedly capitalist bugaboos as manmade climate change that the document comes off as muddled, weak, dishonest, and an attempt to be all things to all people.
Reflecting the administration who drafted it, the NSS is simply schizophrenic in its claims to moral leadership and its amoral view of international relations. The memo is laden with obfuscation intended to half-veil the designs of the administration to transition America from a sovereign, capitalist nation founded on individual liberty into an engine for international wealth redistribution to address economic inequality, the theoretical source of all evil in the Marxist worldview.
The NSS is simply rife with unblinking platitudes, such as in President Obama's juvenile intro that "security will come not from our ability to instill fear in other peoples, but through our capacity to speak to their hopes." Is our commander-in-chief so naive that he really thinks that we can deter enemies in the long-term simply by being congenial? Are we to inspire 'hope' in foreign peoples by perpetually hitting up American taxpayers to fund hapless, clueless, and corrupt international organizations to fight over-hyped chimeras like manmade climate change, and on behalf of abstract ideals with no measurement of victory and no hope of resolution?
What renders the NSS memo incomprehensible as a guide for analysts to predict America's actions in the future is its lip service to American ideals like individualism and "democracy" (I take severe umbrage with this terminology - individual rights are what makes Western life desirable, not the institutions that preserve them), while claiming that we "share values" with states throughout Europe, Asia, the Americas, and including the socialist, dictatorial, communist, and Islamic regimes. This is utter nonsense and a mental disconnect with reality indicative of the cultural relativism and moral nihilism that have infested the intellectual class. While the NSS claims we need to "renew" our moral leadership in the world, we are apparently to do that by "engaging" every country ad infinitum, fettering ourselves further under international institutions, and by acting like every other failed state-led paternalistic economy in the world.
Beyond the NSS' risible strategy of "leading" through submission to the will of the disparate states of the world, there is the matter that a state lacks credibility when its moralizing is not backed up by its actions. Who would we be to lecture the PIIIGs of Europe about fiscal austerity? Who are we to advocate respect for the rule of law, when our administration tramples the Constitution with such actions as nationalizing GM, and mocks 'democracy' by passing the despicable healthcare legislation against the clear will of the American people? Such mixed messages strike me, and presumably the "world community," as dishonest, amateurish, designed to obfuscate, and unserious.
But as much as the message the NSS sends to the world cannot be taken seriously, in light of the actual consensus of people and disinterested scientists that manmade climate change is a scam, that the avian and swine flu "pandemics" were WHO-led frauds, and that what threatens international security most pressingly is the rise of a nuclear Iran and wmd-laden terrorist organizations, the message to the American people is perhaps even more ambiguous, incredible, and at points, foreboding.
While the NSS speaks of reclaiming the mantle of global leadership through education and innovation, there is no acknowledgment of the conditions that actually promote excellence in those endeavors. One apparently must make the tacit assumption that these things will happen if only the government wills it; this is the assumption of failed statist programs around the world. America rose to the top in university-level education and in terms of scientific innovation through market competition, choice, and entrepreneurial incentives. This administration has done nothing to address the lack of ideological diversity in the already conformist university system, has consolidated (by stealth) government student loans and grants, has supported further control over public education through teacher's unions and the DOE, has denied even charter school funding in D.C., has all but obliterated entrepreneurial incentives through imposing potentially crushing healthcare insurance burdens and by threatening taxes, such as VAT and the eclipse of the Bush tax cuts for "the rich" (which includes the working class and small business owners). Any notion that the Obama administration will actually accomplish the supposed goal of leading in education and innovation with more statist programs would be more laughable if it weren't also hopelessly delusional.
In addition to the tragicomic effect of the NSS punctuating lofty goals with futile strategies, there are also clear warnings to the American people about the intentions of this administration that should not be missed. The most foreboding passage in the NSS that I came across (prefaced by a statement about "commitment to deficit reduction"!) that Americans should be concerned about:
"These steps complement our efforts to integrate homeland security with national security; including seamless coordination among Federal, state, and local governments to prevent, protect against, and respond to threats and natural disasters." (2)
It is absolutely vital that Americans oppose such "integration" of security services, for without a shadow of a doubt, such designs are the harbinger of a police state. States' internal security, such as the state police and national guard, and the federal government's internal and foreign security organs must be decoupled and placed under competing authorities. The argument that centralization and consolidation means efficiency is not borne out by evidence; communication and redundancy, while imaginatively utilizing new technology, can shore up many of the problems that stem from the decentralization of police, security, defense, and intelligence authorities.
In contradistinction to the NSS, America needs to advance its moral leadership in opposition to the statist, socialist, and Islamist states of the world. We need to stand by allies with whom we truly share the values of "democracy" and individual rights. We need to defeat terrorists abroad using aggressive techniques meant to inspire fear in our enemies, while avoiding over-expansion, tremendous financial and human costs, and open-ended "development" and democratization projects. Ironically, democracy in pure form can be destabilizing and gives form to the ideological dispositions of the culture it purports to represent. Eliding our ideological differences with our adversaries is not facing the world as it is. Acknowledging that enemies like Iran and North Korea and adversaries like Russia and China are not as easily misled by platitudes, signaling, propaganda, and token overtures as the American people were during President Obama's election campaign requires a determination to show real leadership and a commitment to action. As we have seen with this administration time and again, its claims to leadership have been all rhetoric and no reality.
See also:
Overview of 2010 National Security Strategy
Paralyzing American Power by Gary Johnson, Jr. in American Thinker
National Security Strategy 2010: No Clear Path by Austin Knuppe at Long War Journal
The National Security Strategy of 2010. Or 2006. Or Whatever. by Max Boot at Commentary magazine
Thursday, June 10, 2010
The Hysteria Over Vulgarity
Social conservatives are up in arms over the vulgarity unleashed by a thirteen-year old girl on a morning show live on network TV. Apparently the teen said the "C word" twice (and no, that word was not "Christian" or "conservative").
Why are some people mortally afraid of the sounds that come out of a person's mouth? Talk about superstitious nonsense. The social conservatives' ban on public vulgarity is consistent with the leftists' political correctness crusade, which also entails the censorship of "hate speech," racist epithets, etc. The points of view of both camps when it comes to selective censorship (not just of words, but potentially art, pornography, etc.) are so eerily similar that one sometimes wonders how meaningful and useful is the patented political dichotomy of conservatism and leftism.
The Today show segment mentioned above regarding the incidentally swearing thirteen-year old is specifically designed to grant more arbitrary discretion to the government regarding the enforcement of speech standards by eroding our judgment and respect for the rule of law. The matter at hand was the spurious connection of abusive text messages and actual violence committed against a fellow student.
In the angle pursued by the Today show, we are to all become as the "wise Latina" Justice Sotomayor and seek a compassionate, "empathetic" basis for law, which, because of the subjectivist nature of such a legal disposition, would not be law at all. It would be the granting of legislative and judicial fiat to those government officials who may or may not have our best interests in mind, and who may use such power, particularly in time of "crisis," to shut down undesirable viewpoints. But liberals and social conservatives are routinely unable to make such connections, due to their instrumental view of government as a mechanism to promote their respective causes, which all-too-rarely entail the expansion of social and economic freedom.
In my minority view as a "hardcore libertarian" (see quiz for a loose political categorization), there is liberty and tyranny, free speech and censorship, and the so-called political philosophies of the two major parties are but convenient veneers for the accumulation and wielding of power, each in their own particular and symbiotic way. One wonders what would happen if a philosophically consistent political party could even rise to power in such a climate of ideological confusion occasionally referred to as Kultursmog.
I concede that I just don't get what constitutes vulgarity in the minds of most people. There are no set philosophically consistent rules. Apparently Americans are of the mind, to adapt Justice Potter Stewart's comment of pornography, that they know vulgarity "when they see it," or in the case of the "C-word" uttering teenager, when they hear it. (See Carlin's The Seven Words on YT above for more on what I mean.)
The Road to Serfdom: Number 1 on Amazon!
One of the best tomes for making sense of America's "well-intentioned" path to hell, F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, has been number one on Amazon for one week! John Stossel and Glenn Beck have featured the book on their respective shows recently, giving this classic an instant boost.If you haven't read it yet, grab a paperback (I recommend the definitive edition, which has solid footnotes and references). For those on the go, check out the cartoon edition that was originally published in Look magazine and the condensed version that was published in Reader's Digest. Read it now - and then give it to a progressive drone!
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Quote of the Day
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. – Mark Twain
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
YGTBFKM: Obama Uses BP Oil Disaster to Rewarm Dead Climate Change Bill
I would be more outraged if this wasn't so utterly, almost laughably predictable:
Obama is so preoccupied with ramming through his agenda that any chance for pr lubrication will suffice - even the most implausible. Apparently, the president believes that we are "addicted to oil" and if it wasn't that we'd be "addicted to coal" and if not that we'd be "addicted to nuclear." That is kind of the way it works: Energy is at the center of the capitalist industrial economy. Yes, we are addicted to energy, just like we are addicted to life, and addicted to not freezing to death, and addicted to driving to work and wherever we damn well please on vacation (provided we put in enough to earn it). This jerk is so transparent anymore, the only people he is fooling are fourth grade elementary schoolers, drunk and stoned college students, and "Obama money" junkies.
Obama hopes oil spill boosts support for climate bill
President Obama tried Wednesday to rechannel public outrage about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill into support for a climate-change bill, seeking to redefine an issue that threatens to tarnish his presidency. [...]
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