By  Willie Soon and Paul Driessen

Newly proposed air pollution rules impose exorbitant costs for illusory health benefits.

In December 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency released new Clean Air Act “National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants.” Once again, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson touted the supposedly huge benefits of controlling emissions of mercury (Hg) and other air toxics from U.S. coal- and oil-fired power plants (or electric generating units, EGUs).

The people of Idaho may welcome this new rule, since EPA’s miraculous modeling machine has promised to prevent “six premature deaths” and create “up to $54 million” in health benefits by 2016 – even though not one coal-fired EGU in Idaho fits the EPA’s final rules. Even the District of Columbia, which has only one oil-fired unit, will somehow, magically realize “up to $120 million” in health benefits, presumably from new restrictions on coal-fired units in Maryland or Virginia.

The average U.S. citizen, however, can be excused for no longer being willing to be penalized by EPA – the Extreme Punishment Authority – for such minimal, imaginary and manufactured benefits.

In fact, the final rule may be the most expensive one ever devised by EPA. And yet, even EPA admits, the alleged “hazards to public health” from mercury and non-mercury emissions from American EGUs are “anticipated to remain after imposition” of the new regulations.

As to benefits, EPA computer models claim Hg emission cuts will reduce average per person “avoided IQ loss” by an undetectable “0.00209 IQ points,” with estimated “total nationwide benefits” of $500,000 to $6.1 million by 2016. For the electric utility sector, says EPA, net job creation from the rules will be “not statistically different from zero” and could be between minus 15,000 and plus 30,000 jobs.

In fact, the new regulations will likely eliminate tens of thousands of jobs annually, especially in energy-intensive industries that rely on low-cost electricity to survive and face growing competition from foreign companies that pay far less for energy, labor and raw materials. Small businesses will also get hammered.

“EPA cannot certify that there will be no SISNOSE from this rule,” the agency admits. “SISNOSE” is EPA-speak for “significant impacts on a substantial number of small entities.” In other words, the rules are likely to inflict significant economic harm on small businesses, and thus on the health and welfare of numerous (former) small business owners, employees and families. The agency failed to explain why it has once again ignored the adverse impacts on human health and welfare caused by its rules.

EPA also confessed that U.S. power plants actually contribute a mere 3% of the total mercury deposited in computer-modeled American watersheds, and thus in fish tissue. Citizens will justifiably wonder where the other 97% comes from, and why we should spend so much money for so little benefit. (The “missing” mercury comes from foreign sources and from volcanoes, subsea vents and other natural sources.)

To see how extreme EPA’s scenarios are, consider five more egregious errors in the final regulations. First, EPA admitted it could “calculate risk” for only 3,100 (4%) of the continental USA’s 88,000 watersheds.

Second, for over 60% of the 3,100 watersheds it did model, EPA took only one or two fish mercury measurements – making it virtually impossible to adopt even valid 75th-percentile fish mercury values. There is a breaking point where extremely poor statistical sampling renders EPA’s pretentious number crunching, conclusions and rules invalid. That breaking point has clearly been reached.

Third, the agency’s estimates for mercury exposure risks are solely for “hypothetical female subsistence consumers” who daily eat almost a pound of fish that they themselves catch in U.S. streams, rivers, and lakes over a 70-year lifetime. That’s less than 1% of U.S. women. For the rest of American women (who eat mostly ocean fish, purchased at a grocery, on a far less regular basis), EPA’s rules are irrelevant.

Fourth, EPA admits that only 22 to 29% of its computer-modeled watersheds are “at risk” from EGU mercury, even when it erroneously assumed that at least 5% of total Hg deposition into the watersheds came from U.S. power plants. If the modeling criteria were tweaked only slightly – to reflect average freshwater fish consumption rates for American women, and require that at least 15% of total mercury deposition be attributable to EGUs – not one U.S. watershed would be at risk.

Finally, EPA ignores the presence of selenium in nearly all fish. Its strong attraction to mercury molecules protects fish and people against buildups of methylmercury (MeHg), mercury’s biologically active and more toxic form.

Combining any series of small probability scenarios results in a near-zero likelihood that the events will actually happen. If each of five scenarios has only a 20% chance of happening, the likelihood that all five will happen is 0.032 percent.

As the preceding analysis suggests, the probability that all the EPA’s improbable scenarios will actually happen is virtually zero; the likelihood that its new regulations will benefit human health is also zero.

However, EPA still stubbornly “disagrees that [mercury] exposure levels in the U.S. are lower than those in the Faroe Islands.” Exposure to MeHg in the U.S. is “the same” as in the Faroe Islands, EPA insists.

The agency is simply wrong.

Extensive medical and scientific studies demonstrate that average Americans are exposed to at least 5 to 10 times less MeHg than average Faroe Islanders. The islanders consume large quantities of pilot whale meat and blubber – which is high in methylmercury, high in PCBs and low in selenium. As a result, their blood mercury concentrations can be up to 350 times higher than the mean blood mercury levels measured by the Centers for Disease Control for average American women.

The Faroe Islands study is irrelevant to mercury exposure risk for average Americans. EPA’s use of that study is deceptive. American women and children are safe from any likely threats from mercury.

To top it off, EPA itself proclaims: “The emissions limits in today’s rule are technology-based … and do not need to be justified based on their ability to protect public health.”

In other words, if the technology exists to eliminate these pollutants, the agency will impose the new regulations – regardless of their cost, their effect on electricity prices and reliability, their impact on factory and other jobs, and whether the rules actually do little or nothing to improve human health.

It has become increasingly obvious that EPA’s real goal is to assert its authority over ever-increasing segments of our economy; reinterpret medical and scientific studies to fit its regulatory agenda; and replace as many coal-fired power plants as possible with costly, unreliable renewable energy systems.

American voters, elected officials and courts need to challenge these radical, unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, demand an end to EPA’s distortion of science and reality – and reverse these flawed rules.

Willie Soon is a natural scientist with strong interest in mercury and public health issues. Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality.

 

WesternFront America

In 1991, the Soviet Union, arguably the greatest experiment in Communism, collapsed. After Mao Zedong died in 1976, his successors moved to shift its Communist economy to one that embraced Capitalism while retaining centralized government control.

Following World War Two, the recovering nations of Europe were rescued from Communism by the Marshall Plan, but adopted Communism-Light in the form of Socialism. The U.S. was already headed in that direction, creating programs that we now call “entitlements.” For most of the nation’s history, such “entitlements” did not exist.

What binds together the financial problems of the West is the common thread of infantile behavior and thought. One might call it wishful thinking. Instead of encouraging people to provide for old age and possible illness, politicians decided to turn government into Big Daddy, the eternal source of money for everything.

Need to go to college, start a business, or plan for retirement? Government would be there to help. All this ignored the need to actually pay for these programs. In the case of Social Security Congress began to dip into its funding to pay for other programs! This is what children do.

One can look around the world and see what a failure both Communism and Socialism have been. Governments spending more than their tax and other revenues have suffered grievously from this path to default and that includes the United States of America. It can be argued that, with few exceptions–the Reagan years come to mind—Presidents have been poorly served by their economic advisors.

Politicians make poor economists because, in America, members of the House must think of getting reelected every two years and Senators every six. Moreover, being politicians, they believe that the more federal largess they can bring back to their State and then brag about is the one true path to reelection.

At the very beginning of the nation, Thomas Jefferson said it best. “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”

How many commissions and special committees have earnestly produced reports intended to deal with a government grown too large? At the federal level, some two million or more Americans are employed promulgating a deluge of regulations and pushing paper.

Now President Obama says he wants to streamline the federal government.
The real issue is not “streamlining” government agencies by gathering them together under one roof and one administrator, but the failure to end government departments and agencies that no longer serve a useful purpose and whose removal would also remove countless obstacles to economic growth.

In April 2011, Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute warned that “the federal government is on track to spend more than $3.5 trillion this year. What most people don’t know is that government actually costs about 50% more than what it spends. That’s because complying with federal regulations costs an additional $1.75 trillion—nearly an eighth of GDP. And almost none of that cost appears on the budget.”
The United States of America, the greatest engine of wealth the world has ever seen, is bankrupt. The national debt exceeds the Gross Domestic Product, the sum total of all revenue generated by goods and services.

The President has asked that the debt ceiling be raised another trillion or so and Congress will comply. That, I submit, is insane.

I also submit that, since Barack Obama was sworn into office on January 20, 2009, the nation has been witness to the economic insanity personified in the man and in the Democrat-controlled Congress that was his partner until 2010 when the control of the House of Representatives was wrested away by the Tea Party movement and its support for Republican candidates.

The only constant in life is change. America’s demography has changed. We have, thanks to medical care and other advantages, a much older segment of the population than ever before, but the nation from the 1930s to the 1960s had committed itself to ensure they would have Medicare and Medicaid at a time when people more often than not died in their 50’s and 60’s. We now have an average life expectancy of 78 years. My parents lived into their 90s.

Politics, not economics, continues to make it impossible to revise and restructure both Medicare and Social Security to reflect this reality. Instead, we had Obamacare foisted upon us which took trillions from Medicare and imposes rules that will let elderly heart attack or stroke victims die rather than pay for a level of care to which they contributed during their working years.

If the Supreme Court declares Obamacare unconstitutional it will go away. If we elect a Republican Senate, the repeal already passed in the House will be passed and it will go away.

But America’s economic problems will not go away until Americans insist that the shackles of Big Government be cut loose to enable the growth of an energy industry that can not only make the nation energy independent, but produce billions in revenue as far as the eye can see into the future.

The tax system with its thousands of pages must be revised to a simpler, fairer program. It makes no sense that forty percent of Americans pay no taxes at all.
It’s not that we don’t know what must be done. Conservative think tanks like The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, The Heartland Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and others have spelled out programs that can and will save America, but the nation must be led by a president who understands that Capitalism involves budgeting, planning, hard work, and—yes—risk.

The federal government is running on “continuing resolutions.” It has not had a formal budget since Obama arrived. This is no way to run the greatest nation on the face of the Earth. America is on a suicide watch and we are just an election away from saving it.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

 

WesternFront America

Many DC–area residents have a taxi story. Few have happy endings. Mine occurred on a very rainy day at Union Station. I’d been shuffling along in an endless taxi line when my turn finally arrived. The cab pulls up and fortunately I happened to glance inside before I entered.

The cab’s vinyl–covered backseat was already occupied by a puddle of rainwater. A situation like this is a win–win for the cab driver: He gets a fare and my pants soak up the wet spot. It’s harder so see an advantage for the passenger.

Since DC taxis operate under a regime of rules and regulations my role as a cog in this vast machine was to get in the cab, let my BVDs absorb the water and beseech the authorities to rectify this injustice to my private parts at a later date.

But I’m a conservative, so I asked the driver to wipe the seat.

He replied, “Get in the cab.”

I asked if paper towels had been invented in his country and he replied, “Get in the cab.”
Peer pressure began to rear its ugly head. Line dwellers pressing up behind me wondered why I didn’t get in the dang cab. What’s more, the petty line bureaucrat was holding the door open and motioning me inside.

Further negotiation with the driver appeared pointless. Instead, I decided to try a market–based solution. Taking this cab and getting to my destination sooner was not worth riding like a frog in a puddle, so I asked the rider behind me if he wanted the cab. Evidently worries about mold growing in places that are hard to reach were less for him than myself, so he took the taxi. I took the next one, which featured a dry seat.

Citizens are competent to conduct transportation market transactions like this without government intervention, yet in DC liberals are not only increasing taxi regulation, they are aping policies that have been proven to be monopolistic and anti–consumer in other cities.

Mayor Vincent Gray (D–What, Me Worry?) and Council member Mary Cheh (D–Serious, Intellectual Glasses) want to establish a taxi monopoly by instituting a medallion system. This would limit the 10,672 licensed cabdrivers and 116 cab companies to only 4,000 medallions, stifling future competition and guaranteeing higher prices.

The medallion system in New York and Boston has proven a windfall for medallion owners and a disaster for competition. The last medallion sale in NYC went for $1 million each. In Boston the average price is $400,000. Both prices are in indication of artificial market scarcity created by government.

As part of the medallion package, DC would impose vehicle age and mileage limits, while offering the ability to pay with a credit card — something that has been possible in Las Vegas for years — but there is no mention of installing paper towel racks.

Cabs would also be limited to a single color, white in the esteemed Ms. Cheh’s opinion, while potentially adding a surcharge to each fare so the customer can pay for the politician’s “improvements.”

This is why liberal government is so expensive. There is simply no area of life or color scheme that the progressive mind does not think it can improve with a few laws and subsequent regulation.

The question is: why is government involved at all? Medallion systems and cab commissions protect existing businesses and generate campaign contributions at the expense of the public. This latest taxi legislation only proves the DC council is incapable of embarrassment, since the last time it was discussed a staffer for Council member Jim Graham (D–Bribe, What Bribe?) went to jail for soliciting bribes from cab companies that would benefit from the bill.

The federal government deregulated the airline industry over 30 years ago and ticket prices are lower now than in the 70’s. (Of course this also made it possible for people who wear pajamas in public to fly, but you take the good with the bad.) Bus companies are competing on the DC to NYC route and fares have never been lower and the buses vie with each other to offer more passenger amenities, without design help from Ms. Cheh.

Government doesn’t need to set fares, limit cab numbers or pick the color. All that’s required is a background check and exam for drivers, vehicle safety inspection rules, a requirement that fares (determined by the company) be clearly visible on the door of the cab and a reasonable number of inspectors. The market can handle the rest.
Is something like this possible? Can we ever prevent government from meddling in areas it isn’t needed?

It just so happens I have an idea. Make it illegal for candidates to accept campaign contributions from any industry that’s operations are substantially regulated by the office they seek.

I think we would soon see a tidal wave of deregulation.

Michael R. Shannon is a public relations and advertising consultant with corporate, government and political experience around the globe. He is a dynamic and entertaining keynote speaker. He can be reached at
michael-shannon@comcast.net.

Michael R. Shannon
MANDATE: Message, Media & Public Relations
703-583-6277
571-969-1995 Google Voice
http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelrshannon
http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-washington-dc/michael-shannon

 

WesternFront America

We are living in times when the structures involving the global financial system, national security, and self-governance are under attack, decaying, or just self-destructing due to all the ills to which humanity is prone.

Wars in the twentieth century were always an example of either the failure of nations to resolve their differences or of the ancient human inclination to steal whatever they can from their neighbor. Wars organize this into armies for that purpose. The other cause for war is the necessity to rid the neighborhood of the crazy guy who’s hoarding weapons and building bombs.

What is occurring of late, however, goes beyond the usual casus belli to something far greater, a loss of faith in national and international banking systems, aggravated by the failure of nations to act in a prudent fashion to protect the wealth of their citizens and their national sovereignty.

The cause of this is socialism, the polite name for communism. Like Islam, it exists for world domination, the control of the population for the enrichment of those holding the reins of power. It is no accident that the U.S. Congress is filled with millionaires or those who soon will be.

Communism, the creation of a man who never held a job in his life, Karl Marx, and its theoretically gentler version, Socialism, has proved to be a failure wherever it was implemented. It is always introduced as the antechamber to utopia, a better life for everyone and it has always led to the slaughter of millions in the name of achieving it. It is just another form of slavery.

Socialism, as practiced throughout the United States and Europe, dependent as it is on the “redistribution of wealth” in the form of “entitlement” programs is now crashing down around the heads of various elected leaders.

As the former British Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher, once famously said, “Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”

When you pile on debt beyond the mind’s capacity to imagine and you empower “super committees” or hold desperate meetings as are occurring in Europe, public faith in national currencies begins to disappear and with it a rational world in which goods and services generate income.

We are now 66 years since the end of World War Two, the war that followed “the war to end all wars”, World War One. Peace—the absence of war—lasted a scant twenty-one years in Europe before the latter cataclysm began in 1939.

Times of turmoil are the perfect opportunity for tyrants of every description to emerge, organize the collective anger, and launch new wars. In the past 66 years of “peace” there has been a succession of wars, usually between Communist and Capitalist nations such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars or civil wars. The recent wars and revolutions in the Middle East have been about oil and who gets to pump it out of the ground.

Threatening the entire world is the rise of the Islamic Revolution. Islam is less a religion than a battle plan for global conquest that has the added fillip of enslaving its adherents in a faith system that demands total obedience on pain of death. Unbelievers in general face this threat. Israel in particular always has.

Capitalism isn’t a perfect system, subject to periodic cycles of recession and depression, but it does require a greater measure of individual freedom than any other in order to encourage the kind of innovation and risk-taking that creates vast wealth-producing economies.

The problem the West is facing has been brought on by the profligate and often corrupt waste of the people’s wealth. This has been the result of metastasizing laws whose ultimate purpose is to keep populations from demanding more freedom from rapacious taxing, borrowing, and spending. Even central banks are powerless against this. Ours, the Federal Reserve, has responded by printing dollars out of thin air.

On November 18th a proposed constitutional amendment that would require Congress to balance the budget failed in the House. The U.S. is currently $15 trillion in debt. The worst fears of our Founding Fathers are coming true. Presiding over the nation is a Marxist ideologue and his henchmen.

When the Congress of the United States of America refuses to obey the limits of the Constitution, you have failure.

When that same Congress refuses to reform “entitlement” programs and reduce massive spending, you have failure.

When the Federal Reserve—a central bank that is not a part of the federal government— owns most of the nation’s debt, you have failure.

In my lifetime, the United States of America went from a largely Capitalist system and society to one of near total government control. It is Socialism supported by an insane system of taxation lacking even the appearance of fairness.

The United States has moved too far away from the purpose of the Constitution, established to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…”

We are that posterity,

In the decades since the last Great Depression a succession of Congresses has bankrupted the nation once again. It is happening as well in Europe because nations like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and France thought they too could defy common sense and fiscal prudence.

It is system failure on a global scale.

Americans and the citizens of Europe are the unwilling victims of too much government, too much regulation, too much corruption, too much taxation, and the general inclination of those in charge to acquire as much wealth for themselves while keeping the rest of the population complacent with “redistribution of wealth” schemes that always fail.

The Tea Party movement is calling for a restoration of America. We have precious little time to do that and it is the Democratic Party in league with unions who oppose that goal.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

 

WesternFront America

The chicanery being played against the American people by lunatics working so hard for their own destruction is cranking up:

Eliminating the Electoral College Eliminates States Rights and Obama Remains As President

“While we are paying attention to the OWS and to Republican debates where the candidates annihilate each other, the Progressives have a plan to keep themselves in power forever, starting in 2012.

“They plan to do this by eliminating the role of states, a protection written into our Constitution, and they are doing it covertly while in plain sight. The Progressive initiative is called the “National Popular Vote Compact” aka NPVC and their information is being spread nationwide via the Internet since 2008.

“They claim it is “true democracy” but “democracy” to them is interchangeable with “socialism” and worse, as it was in the sixties. They are moving state by state to bypass the Constitutional amendment process, relegating our SCOTUS to complete insignificance. As per the Communist Manifesto, “popularism” is the means of “democracy.” It achieves a monopoly of democratic parties for the worldwide Socialist order.

“Their goal is to have all the required 270 Electoral Votes needed for a “winner” given to the candidate who wins the largest number of popular votes nationally – no matter how small the win margin and no difference how many states voted to oppose him.

“Once enough states have passed it to reach the 270 Electoral Votes, the NPVC goes into effect for the next and all Presidential elections. This bill currently has passed enough state houses to reach 160 EV’s out of the 270 needed. It won’t matter how strongly some states are against it. NPVC has passed 1 of the 2 required chambers in more than 30 other states.

“This could become the Law of the Land, trashing our Constitution and the rights of individual states and their residents. Are you surprised given Obama’s penchant for suing states? Plus, we’d never get rid of this thing.

“The electoral college system gives all states representation in our government, so that ranchers in Wyoming, and elite et al in NYC have a say in who becomes President.”

Not surprising if you understand the bigger picture. This isn’t just about putting the same ineligible candidate back in the White House. It’s about the continuing effort to subvert our legal form of government (a constitutional republic) and force democracy (mob rule) to finish us off. Please note at the bottom of the column above (Eliminating EC Eliminates States Rights) the list of states who have already sold out and ones considering giving us the shaft.

Some states even believe they can get away with amending the U.S. Constitution:

Will the Electoral College Become a Thing of the Past?

“The Electoral College could be inching closer to extermination as California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill Monday that would award the state’s 55 electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote.”

Would you expect anything less from a cocaine addled old hippie the stupid people of California voted back into office? Governor Moonbeam served before his current term (1975–83), but apparently the voters have short memories.

Section 1, Article II of the U.S. Constitution is very specific:

“Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.

“The electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for two persons, of whom one at least shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves. And they shall make a list of all the persons voted for, and of the number of votes for each; which list they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted. The person having the greatest number of votes shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such majority, and have an equal number of votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately choose by ballot one of them for President; and if no person have a majority, then from the five highest on the list the said House shall in like manner choose the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by States, the representation from each state having one vote; A quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. In every case, after the choice of the President, the person having the greatest number of votes of the electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal votes, the Senate shall choose from them by ballot the Vice President.

“The Congress may determine the time of choosing the electors, and the day on which they shall give their votes; which day shall be the same throughout the United States.”

Neither of the above will survive a court challenge even with the current U.S. Supreme Court or even the Ninth Silly Circuit Court of Appeals. Let me tell you why.

Remember the effort (I supported in spirit, but knew it would be overturned by the courts and rightfully so) back in 1994 to impose term limits on Congress by the states? Many passed such bills, but it was shot down by the U.S. Supreme Court:

U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton (93-1456), 514 U.S. 779 (1995)

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

Nos. 93-1456 and 93-1828

U. S. TERM LIMITS, INC., et al., PETITIONERS 93-1456 v. RAY THORNTON et al. WINSTON BRYANT, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF ARKANSAS, PETITIONER 93-1828 on writs of certiorari to the supreme court of arkansas
[May 22, 1995]

“Before addressing these arguments, we find it appropriate to take note of the striking unanimity among the courts that have considered the issue. None of the overwhelming array of briefs submitted by the parties and amici has called to our attention even a single case in which a state court or federal court has approved of a State’s addition of qualifications for a member of Congress. To the contrary, an impressive number of courts have determined that States lack the authority to add qualifications.”

The states attempted to amend the U.S. Constitution without a constitutional amendment.

Many of you might recall my coverage regarding the recall of Sen. Robert Menendez. I predicted the plaintiffs would lose and I was right:

Sen. Menendez Recall Killed by NJ Supreme Court

I very highly recommend a book that should be required reading in all classrooms. It’s only 100 pages and it’s also available in E Book:

The Evolution and Destruction of the Original Electoral College by Gary and Carolyn Alder

E Book- click here.

There is going to be a huge war to keep Obama/Soetoro/Dunham or whatever his real name is off the ballot for 2012. I believe this time around it will happen, but, as they say: Never put all your eggs in one basket and we must protect the Constitution from predators like those behind the so called National Popular Vote Compact. Here’s another article on it.

Obviously the so-called “National Popular Vote Compact” must be stopped either by the state houses or by more lawsuits.

I know you’re going to groan, but please print out this column and send it to your state rep and senator. Attach it with a short snail mail letter (forget email) that gets put on their desk at a district office. Many states are out of session, so sending a letter to the state capitol just gets lost in the shuffle. I’ve also found that staff members at district offices at the state level are usually very nice and want to take the time to understand your call or letter. Please make time to write that letter because every one will count.

Devvy Kidd authored the booklets, Why A Bankrupt America and Blind Loyalty; 2 million copies sold. Devvy appears on radio shows all over the country. She left the Republican Party in 1996 and has been an independent voter ever since. Devvy isn’t left, right or in the middle; she is a constitutionalist who believes in the supreme law of the land, not some political party.

Devvy’s regularly posted new columns are on her site at: www.devvy.com. You can also sign up for her free email alerts.

E-mail is: devvyk@earthlink.net

 

WesternFront America

In Entry on the U.S. Census, the Encyclopedia That Any Leftwing Fraud Can Edit Promotes “Race Does Not Exist” Myth

[Photo - Scientific fraud Franz Boas as a young buck]

[Previously, see: “Wikipedia on Race: ‘World’s biggest encyclopedia’ serves up propaganda.”] The following passage comes from the entry in Wikipedia, or as I call it, The Pretend Encyclopedia, on “Race and ethnicity in the United States Census.”

==Relation between ethnicity and race in census results==

The Census Bureau warns that data on race in United States Census 2000|2000 Census are not directly comparable to those collected in previous censuses. Many US residents consider race and ethnicity to be the same concept. American Anthropological Association. ” A Brief History of the OMB Directive 15.” 1997. May 18, 2007.

[N.S. How many is “many”? WP/TPC’s own guidelines prohibit such squishy language, but in practice, the rules never apply to lefties. If there is confusion about the simple distinction between “ethnicity” and “race,” the confusion owes much to generations of mischief by organized, Marxist anthropology professors and their comrades in other departments and outside of academia, which the editor who inserted the approving reference to the AAA somehow failed to note.

I removed a statistical table that appears in the WP/TPE entry, which was created not as a graphic, but via a text coding method unique to WP/TPE, which does not work elsewhere.]

In the United States Census 2000, respondents were tallied in each of the race groups they reported. Consequently, the total of each racial category exceeds the total population because some people reported more than one race.

According to James P. Allen and Eugene Turner from California State University, Northridge, by some calculations in the 2000 Census the largest part white bi-racial population is white/Native American and Alaskan Native, at 7,015,017, followed by white/black at 737,492, then white/Asian at 727,197, and finally white/Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander at 125,628.

The Census Bureau implemented a Census Quality Survey, gathering data from approximately 50,000 households in order to assess the reporting of race and Hispanic origin in the United States Census 2000 with the purpose [sic] creating a way to make comparisons between the United States Census 2000 with previous Census racial data.

In September 1997, during the process of revision of racial categories previously ]declared by OMB directive no. 15, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) recommended that OMB combine the “race” and “ethnicity” categories into one question to appear as “race/ethnicity” for the United States Census, 2000.

The Interagency Committee agrees, stating that “race” and “ethnicity” were not sufficiently defined and “that many respondents conceptualize ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ as one in the same {{sic}} [N.S. “{{sic}}” was in the Wikipedia text] underscor[ing] the need to consolidate these terms into one category, using a term that is more meaningful to the American people.” [Read: “More meaningful to” Marxists and others waging race war on white Americans.]

The AAA also stated,

“The American Anthropological Association recommends the elimination of the term “race” [sic] from OMB Directive 15 during the planning for the 2010 Census. During the past 50 years, “race” has been scientifically proven to not be a real, natural phenomenon. More specific, social categories such as “ethnicity” [sic] or “ethnic group” [sic] are more salient for scientific purposes and have fewer of the negative, racist connotations for which the concept of race was developed.”

“Yet the concept of race has become thoroughly—and perniciously—woven into the cultural and political fabric of the United States. [The concept of race is older than the United States.] It has become an essential element of both individual identity and government policy. Because so much harm has been based on “racial” [sic] distinctions over the years, correctives for such harm must also acknowledge the impact of “racial” [sic] consciousness among the U.S. populace, regardless of the fact that “race” [sic] has no scientific justification in human biology. Eventually, however, these classifications must be transcended and replaced by more non-racist and accurate ways of representing the diversity of the U.S. population.” [N.S.: My use of “sic” in the previous two paragraphs is due to Wikipedia’s improper use of double quotes both to open and close quoted paragraphs, and for words within the paragraphs, which should receive single quotation marks.]

The recommendations of the AAA were not adopted by the Census Bureau for the United States Census 2000 or the United States Census 2010.

Race has never been “scientifically proven to not be a real, natural phenomenon.” Apparently, professors of anthropology understand under “scientifically proven,” endlessly repeating what they know to be a lie, and destroying the career of anyone who refuses to play along.

The myth that the races are identical in their abilities was spread by Franz Boas (1858-1942), a German Jewish immigrant, whose true faith was socialism. The reason Boas invented the myth was purely political, and anti-scientific. As Zygmund Dobbs showed in The Great Deceit: Social Pseudo-Sciences (1964), Boas was a fanatical socialist who had no training in anthropology, as opposed to physics and geography, and who undertook a deliberate political campaign to hijack anthropology, and turn it into a propagandistic tool of stealthy, organized socialism. Boas was hugely successful.

He and his comrades took over one anthropology department after another. The anti-scientific origins of the “race does not exist” hoax were in Boas’ plan to impose socialism on America. He knew, as everyone did, that there were different races, which were distinguished by their respective inherited characteristics. However, the facts were inconvenient to Boas’ goal of imposing an ideology and state form that asserted that all men had identical abilities. As he wrote, early on,

The anthropologist recognizes that the Negro and the white represent the two most divergent types of mankind,

And

It is true that the average size of the Negro brain is slightly smaller than the average size of the brain of the white race. [Zygmund Dobbs, The Great Deceit: Social Pseudo-Sciences, 175.]

Boas and his acolytes, such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, routed the empirical, scientific study of physical racial differences, and replaced it with “cultural environment theory”: All nurture, no nature. He also committed scientific fraud, in writing a “study” falsely claiming that the skulls of immigrants’ children grew larger, due to the environment in America.

Just as college departments of anthropology were reduced to socialist fronts providing propagandistic pseudo-science by Boas and his devotees (e.g., Margaret Mead and Coming of Age in Samoa, Ruth Benedict and Patterns of Culture, Boas’ works, etc.), Boas also helped socialist fronts outside of academia.

[Scientific fraud Margaret Mead at app. 30 years of age, on a U.S. postage stamp, which was as phony and prettified as her long-time prestige in the social sciences]

[Scientific fraud Margaret Mead as she really looked at app. 30 years of age, in the photograph which was used as the basis for the phony-looking postage stamp]

Boas was long involved with one such non-academic front, the NAACP. He sought to use this radical organization, in order to promote race mixing, blend the two races into one, thereby eliminating the white and black races (in America, at any rate). To this end, he also spread lies touting great black African advances in antiquity.

[Scientific fraud Ruth Benedict]

As Dobbs wrote,

Boas busied himself with giving a professorial tone to the NAACP movement. The nation began to be bombarded by a barrage of so-called scientific opinion on the racial question. The major theme projected was that there are no fundamental differences among races. There was constant repetition that all mankind was cast from the same mold. Only some mysterious compound called the culture complex was said to create differences. For example, Boas would team up with Mary White Ovington in a book which emphasized that the only major differences between the white and Negro races are those of cultural environment. A whole bevy of transitory socialist fronts were created….

In the course of a few decades the well-organized Boas leftist anthropological phalanx had managed to cripple physical anthropology as a scientific discipline. This was done by degrees. The early works of Boas began with a mixture of the cultural approach with anthropometrical and biological data about the different races. Little by little, the physical aspects of anthropology were pushed into the background through ridicule [sound familiar?] and politically inspired charges. By the time Hitler rose to power, the socialists throughout the world, and the Boas group particularly, began to apply epithets of “racism” and “genocide” to those who endeavored to carry on scientific studies of the various races and sub-races of humankind. They were greatly helped by Hitler’s use of the racial theme to excuse his inhumanities.

The Nazi pre-occupation with the theory of Aryan “superiority” to justify their massacres of millions of innocent civilians was cited in literature, speeches, university lectures and newspapers, as the reason for damning all physical investigations into racial differences. [See the Left’s ongoing war on the Pioneer Fund and all whose research it has funded, including some of the world’s foremost scholars of intelligence, e.g., Richard Lynn, J. Philippe Rushton, and Linda Gottfredson.] By imperceptible degrees the Boas leftist school, which was made up of both socialist and communist partisans, began to create the impression that the Aryan “superiority” theory was a Fascistic abomination and invention. [Dobbs, 175f.]

Dobbs shows that it was the Left, above all Marx’ collaborator, friend, and benefactor, Friedrich Engels, that had embraced and promoted the Aryan myth generations before Hitler did.

[The real deal: Zygmund Dobbs]

Boas’ fraudulent assertion that the races were equal in abilities was designed to become self-fulfilling through socialist agitation and social policy. Today’s phony “anthropologists” and other leftist pseudo-scholars (e.g., the late Stephen Jay Gould) are consciously continuing Boas’ work, and have extended his fraudulent claim that the races are identical in abilities to the even more obviously fraudulent claim that there are no different races, and that race exists merely as a “social construct.” And yet, they demand in all areas of human activity that one non-existent race be privileged, and other non-existent races be harmed.

The leftists who control WP/TPC are likewise continuing such pernicious propaganda, with the goal of wiping out the white race. Note that they do not even feign impartiality by at least citing dissenting, more scientific voices, let alone permitting anyone to expose Boas’ deceit, which Wikicensors such as anti-scientific Marxist S.L. Rubenstein have continuously covered up , in Boas’ WP/TPE entry. In this regard, see also the WP/TPC Franz Boas “talk page.”

[I thank my friend and colleague Joel Lefevre for providing me with the brilliant, fearless Dobbs’ research.]

© Nicholas Stix

Mr. Stix blogs at Nicholas Stix, Uncensored

 

WesternFront America

Actually, they’re not lost geographically.  We see them every day on the cable news channels and the evening news of the broadcast networks.  This decade they call themselves the “Occupy Wall Street” Group.  I believe they are lost, unrecoverable, as productive, patriotic, Americans.  I’m no shrink, but I believe they will carry a degree of bitterness, for the reminder of their lives, as a result of America’s rejection of their attempt to force a socialist form of government on a nation of people who love freedom. The risk was theirs to take.  History will record their failure — a failure they will never be able to put behind them. They will drag it like an anchor throughout their lifetime. They have made their choice and they now must live with the consequences.

These people have been around since Vladimir Lenin.  They are espousing the socialist/communist line and they are SOOOOO DUMB they don’t have a clue they are being used by the shadowy figures organizing and financing their infantile protestations.

Those dirty, smelly, boorish, idiots are disposable tools of the leftist power brokers, themselves the mortal enemies of capitalists and democracy.

They are supported by the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Nazi Party, the Democratic Party …… .  We should add the labor unions to this OUTSTANDING gaggle of anti-capitalist left-wingers.

They don’t know WHAT the want – but they want it NOW.  It is the primal cry of an infant seeking attention.

If you are expecting anything good to come of the rent-a-riot crowd in our streets these days, you should reconsider.  This whole “OWS” movement is going to end in disaster.  This ain’t my first rodeo.  I have seen this before. It always ends in tragedy.

As the shrillness of the demonstrators mounts, the public’s tolerance level will fall.  At some point in the future, a tipping point will be reached and blood will be spilt and lives lost.  It is the nature of clashes between groups of human beings.  We call them wars, civil wars, insurrections, riots,

Demonstrations, and at their inception – “protests.”

Power brokers the world over always use the youth to fight their wars and secure their goals.  They use youth’s own overestimation of themselves and their intellect.  For the most part they are that point in life at which they are dumb as posts.  Their minds are mushy and pliable and easily melded into a gestalt or group mentality in which even a coward feels powerful.   They think and act as a single animal with multiple voices expressing thoughts not their own.  They are pitiful creatures. But then, so is a mad dog.

They are the flotsam of our society. They take pride in soiling themselves, our cities, and our society with their witless demands that Americans hand over their freedom and their wealth to an omnipotent government THEY believe will redistribute the collective wealth of America “fairly.”

Grown-ups understand that life is not “fair.”

Economic fairness equals socialism.  Under socialism, the government owns all the wealth of the nation.  The government then doles it out, as IT sees fit, in order that ALL its citizens suffer equally.  Winston Churchill understood that and said so many times.

The protesters we see in America’s streets today are a product of America’s failed educational system, including America’s institutions of “higher” learning.  They have no clear understanding of who they are as Americans.  They are no longer tethered to America’s history and heritage.   Like our current one-term President, Obama, they feel they are citizens of the world rather than citizens of America.  They lack the basic knowledge of the blood, sweat, and tears that went into founding and building this nation while, at the same time, winning its freedom from a despotic king — and maintaining its freedom through the sacrifice of the lives of their forefathers.

They are not “Americans’ in the truest sense of the word.  They are “Globalists.”  The blame for this lack of patriotism toward a country that nurtured them is, in my opinion, the fault of America’s failed educational system.

As I said above – they are flotsam.  They have no attachments, no allegiance, to anything, or anyone, but themselves.  They give new depth to the meaning of “psychopath.”  They have no empathy or remorse for their behavior.

Freedom of speech is one thing.  But attempting to FORCE your will on a society that chose, long ago, to forsake a socialist form of government based on the historical record of socialism’s failure as a workable way to govern and for the pain and anguish it brings to those forced to live by it’s tenants.

America has been deeply wounded by the 1960’s forerunners of the OWS movement.  They have infiltrated our educational system, our clergy, and our government.  Today we are paying the toll for their infectious influence on all three institutions.

Be warned, America.  A second wave of leftist destruction is about to strike our foundational institutions.  It is already too late to turn the tide.  Now we can only face it and stand strong, refusing to give even one inch to the terminal disease that rots the soul of a nation and insures its demise.  Look upon the face of socialism.  Look upon the faces of those who would force YOU to bend to their will and betray your heritage as Americans… your precious freedom.

J. D. Longstreet

VOTE CONSERVATIVE IN NOVEMBER 2012

Conservative? Then visit “INSIGHT on Freedom” at http://www.csadispatch.blogspot.com/ Find conservative comment on nearly everything at “INSIGHT on Freedom!”

 

WesternFront America

I hope he [President Obama] fails.

~ Rush Limbaugh (Inauguration Day, January 2009)

We’ll throw you a bone like affirmative action if you’ll just let us reduce you to your race so we can take moral authority for “helping” you.

~ Shelby Steele

Did white guilt + black victimhood = Obama in ’08? Will white guilt + black victimhood = Obama in ’12? When Rush declared on Inauguration Day 2009, regarding the presidency of Barack Obama, “I hope he fails,” the liberals went wild in a fascist mob frenzy, equating Rush’s statement of affirmation essentially as a racist declaration of treason. What Rush really meant (and liberals fully understood) was that he hoped that President Obama’s policies (i.e., Marxism, socialism, Keynesianism, growing the welfare state exponentially, amnesty for illegal aliens, green energy, oppressive taxes and regulations, war socialism, bowing to dictators, destroying liberty, favoring Muslims, undermining Christianity and turning the Constitution into a suicide pact) would fail.

On Aug. 22, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy was interviewed on the Tom Ashbrook show. Here is an excerpt of the interview:

KENNEDY: On Inauguration Day, a day when there were some people who did not vote for Barack Obama but who said, you know, this is a wonderful day and, you know, this Inauguration Day we’re all joined together, a lot of people took that position, but you just played someone, pretty important personage, Rush Limbaugh, said on Inauguration Day he hoped the man failed. He wasn’t alone. He wasn’t alone.

ASHBROOK: But I’m sure Rush Limbaugh will say, not because he’s black, Randall Kennedy.

KENNEDY: Of course he will say that. The question is, is that true? And I don’t think it’s just because he’s black – but is blackness one of the ingredients of the opposition in the far right wing of the United States? Yes, it is.

As a former student of professor Kennedy during the same time Barack Obama was at Harvard Law School, I had a profound sense of disappointment after I heard professor Kennedy’s ill-informed remarks. I was disappointed that an academic of Kennedy’s reputation would stoop so low as to regurgitate the liberal propaganda “I hope he fails” as a racialist predicate that Rush wanted the entire country to essentially “go to hell,” to quote Rep. Maxine Waters’ recent comment directed at the entire tea-party movement.

The meaning of Rush’s statement was just the opposite. “Mr. Kennedy, do you want unemployment for blacks to be at Depression levels? Do you want, do you support black unemployment at 51 percent? I do not, and I hoped that that didn’t happen,” Rush said. “Do you support the assault on the American business climate? Do you support the assault on success and achievement in this country? Do you want more of the economic destruction that we have had in the last three years?”

How did America get into this catastrophe called Barack Hussein Obama whose socialist policies have given us zero jobs in August? Endemic education propaganda is the short answer. My long-view theory places the blame directly on our public school establishment’s unholy alliance with socialism, unionism and secularism when the NEA was established in 1857. Two years later Darwin’s evolution propaganda screed was published, “The Origin of Species,” which over time was comprehensively integrated into the public school curriculum, especially science, but also in colleges, universities, law schools, graduate schools, business schools and medical schools. Later, under John Dewey’s influence, education was essentially manipulated to indoctrinate students to accept as ipso facto an anti-Christian, anti-American worldview rooted in Darwinian evolution and materialism, Marxist socialism, Nietzschean atheism, relativism and Freud’s perverse sexual theories.

Tragically, most Americans don’t realize that reason, logic, morality and critical thinking, along with America’s founding Judeo-Christian worldview, were thrown out of what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called the “marketplace of ideas,” out of the public schools and written out of college textbooks decades ago. That’s why liberals have been able to propagate their failed, bankrupt policies like education atheism, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the welfare state, pensions, unionism – and the courts and the public falsely believe these policies to be constitutional.

For example, when GOP candidate Gov. Rick Perry calls Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” a “monstrous lie,” and a “violent” attack on core American values, the propaganda press when ballistic – but Perry was right. I just wish more Republicans would have the guts to attack the Big Lie of any liberal policies that favor stealing money from its owners and giving it to those who didn’t earn it and don’t constitutionally deserve it. However, today a venerated Harvard law professor like Randall Kennedy can regurgitate Rush’s “I hope he fails” statement and twist it to mean the opposite of what Limbaugh meant, and most people will believe Kennedy over Rush still three years later because reason, logic and deduction have been replaced with feelings, envy and race guilt.

In November 2008, when 96 percent of my people were beguiled by Obama’s black skin, slick slogans and welfare rhetoric to vote for a man who utterly despises them, whose Marxist, socialist, Keynesian economic policies traps them at 51 percent unemployment in some big cities (it was 25 percent during the Great Depression) and favors Margaret Sanger’s Black Holocaust policies that aborts them at greater percentages than any other racial group, it reminded me of several columns written by Dr. Thomas Sowell as well as Dr. Shelby Steele’s excellent book, “White Guilt: How Whites and Blacks Together Destroyed the Promises of the Civil Rights Era” (2006). It was white guilt and black victimhood that propelled the white vote for Obama. Rush said, “We can assuage our guilt by voting for a black candidate and proudly telling everybody we did and that sends the signal, ‘We’re not racist,’ and they get rid of their guilt.” In return Obama gives America the resurrection of the fascist FDR, the welfare state and the Great Depression, Part 2.

© Ellis Washington

Ellis Washington is a former editor of the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute. He is an instructor at Spring Arbor University, the American College of Education, and the National Paralegal College. Washington is a co-host on “Joshua’s Trial, a radio show of Christian conservative thought. He is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and has written extensively on constitutional law, history, politics, philosophy, critical race theory and other subjects. His latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust” (2008) and law review article, “Natural Law Considerations of Juvenile Law” (2010). Visit his website, Ellis Washington Report.

 

WesternFront America

Americans of my generation are not as surprised, as a lot of Americans these days, at the state of our nation. We saw this coming as far back as fifty years ago. Look about you today. THIS is what the glorious “sixties” has wrought.

The Hippies, the Flower Children, the Pot Heads, the whole scraggly, long haired, dope smoking lot of them – now run every consarned thing!

We are just now beginning to pry them out of our government, but the damage they have done to America will take generations to repair.

Remember their communes, and collectives? They took those socialist ideas right into our state and national legislatures. Now we are paying the price.

But when they took their socialist ideas into the halls of education they fundamentally changed the nation by indoctrinating at least a generation of America’s children in the socialist ideals. They downplayed the importance of American history, of America’s democratic constitutional republican form of government. They declared the Constitution is not set in stone. It is a “living, breathing document” subject to change at the whim of every new generation.

Then they went on to teach our children how great government is as a provider and protector — sort of a “Big Brother, ya know?” They hammered home the idea that government should control everything. See, with the government in control, we’d never have to worry, because the government would provide for our every need.

My generation recognizes that for what it was and is: Socialism leading to communism.

They did, and continue to do, a heck of a lot of damage to America. One of their gifts just keeps on giving: Ignorance:

In 2010 I wrote an article titled: “America’s Golden Age of Ignorance.” (You may read the entire article HERE.) In that article I said: “One can only conclude that America finds herself in the current mess as a direct result of ignorance. “Ignorance of what,” you ask? I must answer, “Ignorance of practically everything.

Ignorance of America’s colorful political history, and that of the world, is much to blame for the Obama Regime’s continued acceptance by vast numbers of Americans. But, I am happy to report that number is growing ever smaller as each day passes.

Ignorance of history, as well as of current events, among the populace of any country, can lead to consequences that are truly awful. Take the election of America’s first socialist government, for instance. The election of 2006 turned our national legislature into a socialist machine bent on creating an even stronger central government with all the power it could grasp. Then, in 2008, the capstone of socialist victory in American politics was the election of Barack Hussein Obama. He promised fundamental change in America. The politically savvy in America understood he meant to lead America into out and out socialism. And he did.

Even today, the average democrat voter will deny the existence of a socialist government in America today. They simply do not recognize it. I am convinced that ignorance stems from the fact that they were not taught the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the genius of America’s founders, and the love of a free constitutional republic that led their ancestors to lay down their lives to protect and preserve the freedom granted by that constitution. That is ignorance.

Back in the day, before teacher’s unions, American students were taught the fundamental concepts of American democracy and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. We learned, as students, that life in America is a priviledge. We learned that freedom is not free, it is preserved by Americans who know its value, even if it means laying down their lives in its defense..

Students also leaned the immeasurable value of The Founding Documents, the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the all important Bill of Rights. They learned that The Founders said what they meant and meant what they said when writing the constiturtion. Students also learned that the US Constitution is a document for the ages. It is not a living breathing document subject to change at the whim of those citizens who live under its protection.

No longer. Today we graduate students wo cannot read their diplomas, who cannot find Canada and Mexico on a map, and have no idea what the Constitution or the Bill of Rights are! They have no clue that the Bill of Rights limits the role of government in the daily lives of Americans.

These are the Americans who placed the so-called democrats in charge of America’s government. I say “so-called” because those of us who have dabbled in politics, all our adult lives, understand that those in charge of the US government today are not democrats as they would have you believe. They are socialists, Marxists, communists, and progressives.

So – how WERE they elected? They were elected by people who genuinely thought they were voting for democrats, and by people who don’t care what kind of government we have so long as their place on the government dole is protected and their “hand outs” continue to arrive every month, and by those who were interested only in the power that would accrue to them if socialists controled the US government. The latter could not have accomplished this feat without the ignorance of the former, whose votes they knew they could count on.

Ignorance is a dangerous, dangerous, thing. WE here in America, are only just re-learning this lesson.” (Read the entire article HERE. )

That was my opinion then and it remains my opinion today.

This is a desperate time for America. We are suffering from self-inflicted wounds. We will be a long time healing. And there will be scars. There are always scars when the soul of a nation is attacked.

Altho the sun is going down on America, it has not set yet. To insure that it will rise and shine brightly on America again, we must reclaim our government, reclaim the dream that is America, and reclaim America’s status as the greatest nation in the world and the global leader of freedom loving peoples everywhere.

J. D. Longstreet

 

WesternFront America

There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword, the other is by debt.

~ John Adams

What was a disaster for Weimar was good, very good for us.

~ Gregor Strasser, Senior Nazi Party leader

What are the logical comparisons and consequences we can understand between the economic, moral and intellectual devolution of Germany under the Weimar Republic that ushered in the National Socialism of Adolf Hitler and a post-Ronald Reagan America (since 1990), that continued the Democratic socialism of Wilson, FDR and LBJ, which eventually ushered in the Age of Obama?

Professor Allan Bloom (d. 1992), author of the modern-day prophecy “The Closing of the American Mind” (1987), did not know Barack Obama, but as a prophet to the academy, Bloom foretold that intellectually decadent societies like Revolutionary France (1789-99), the Weimar Republic (1919-33) and America were ripe for demagogic radicals to fill the moral vacuum inside the souls of Europeans and Americans.

Bloom wrote:

But the Weimar Republic, so attractive in its left-wing version to Americans, also contained intelligent persons, who were attracted, at least in the beginning, to fascism, for reasons very like those motivating the Left ideologues, reflections on autonomy and value creation. Once one plunges into the abyss, there is no assurance whatsoever that equality, democracy or socialism will be found on the other side. At very best, self-determination is indeterminate. … Both [Heidegger and Nietzsche] helped to constitute that ambiguous Weimar atmosphere in which liberals looked like simpletons and anything was possible for people who sang of the joy of the knife in cabarets.

The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression that followed virtually destroyed the Weimar Republic. The Crash had a terrible impact on the American economy, but its negative effects were obscured by America having propped up the Weimar Republic with huge loans in 1924 (the Dawes Plan) and in 1929 (the Young Plan). Furthermore, repeated socialist uprisings and massive hyperinflation moved France and Belgium troops to annex the Ruhr in 1923. Now America needed those loans back to help her declining economy.

Doesn’t 1929 Weimar sound eerily similar to America 2011 with China owning most of our debt? A few weeks ago China unexpectedly dumped 97 percent of our T-bills. What will happen to our already bankrupt economy when China calls in the trillions in loans we owe them? Answer: America will become the Weimar Republic of the 21st century where people will need a wheelbarrow load of money just to buy bread.

Weimar in the 1920s lacked a conventional, broadly based conservative party. The DNVP was extreme, regressive and completely detached from its traditional political base as evident with the election of the moribund President Paul von Hindenburg and his lackey appointees – Chancellors Bruening, Franz von Papen and General Kurt von Schleicher – until a no-confidence vote in the Reichstag in January 1933 forced a new coalition of leftist radicals (nationalists and communists) bringing to the forefront the only man with the charisma and authority to keep Germany together – the megalomaniac Adolf Hitler.

The Weimar Republic was also infamous for its cultural experimentation and bohemian values, which alienated many traditionalists. Hitler and the Nazis repeatedly exploited these social divisions. The Old Guard also underestimated the ambitious Hitler. It was an astonishing miscalculation. They realized too late that it was the Nazis who used them.

There is a wise saying that “In troubled times, the fearful and naïve are always drawn toward charismatic radicals.” A paralyzing fear of Bolshevism dominated both the old and the new elites during the Weimar period. Likewise, America, having elected a real conservative Republican (Reagan) in 1980, irrationally followed his two successful terms with a series of four presidents who were essentially three Democratic socialists and a Marxist who all embraced the progressive, socialist and Keynesian promiscuous spending policies that doomed the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and which have brought America to the brink of economic catastrophe in 2011 under President Obama.

Is Obama destroying America’s economy on purpose? Regrettably, yes.

New figures released last Wednesday by the Congressional Budget Office show debt rising to 190 percent of the gross domestic product by 2035. The annual long-term budget outlook forecasts a surge in public debt this year that will rise to 70 percent of GDP by the end of fiscal 2011, compared to 62 percent by the end of 2010. In contrast, by the end of 2011, Greece’s debt will be around 150 percent of GDP – and that nation is on the verge of national bankruptcy, ironically propped up by Germany.

It was the Cassandra-figure Winston Churchill who in the 1920s predicted the rise of Hitler and his bloodlust Gestapo and Brownshirts to a skeptical, indolent Europe. Nobody listened to Churchill until it was too late.

Borrowing a page from Hitler’s playbook, Barack Obama, in a speech delivered in Colorado Springs on July 2, 2008, called for his own personal police force:

We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded [as America's combined military forces].

Few Americans realize that truly Obama fulfilled that campaign promise and today has legions of paid bureaucrats (“Brownshirts”) sworn to his allegiance just like Hitler’s Brownshirts and Gestapo of the 1920s and ’30s.

History has repeatedly taught humanity that nature abhors a vacuum – whether it was Greece, Rome, Weimar, Europe, Russia, China, Iran or America – and that the degree nations have departed from God, the Bible, veritas, natural law: the synthesis of legality and morality, was the degree that they embraced charismatic radicals who always led the people down the path to perdition.

In the end, socialists are socialists first. If Strasser were a Democrat of today perhaps he would say, What was a disaster for America was good, very good for us (Obama and the Progressive Revolution).

Ellis Washington is a former editor of the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute. He is an instructor at Spring Arbor University, the American College of Education, and the National Paralegal College. Washington is a co-host on “Joshua’s Trial, a radio show of Christian conservative thought. He is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and has written extensively on constitutional law, history, politics, philosophy, critical race theory and other subjects. His latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust” (2008) and law review article, “Natural Law Considerations of Juvenile Law” (2010). Visit his website, Ellis Washington Report.

 

WesternFront America