A High Stakes Clash of Economists

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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A Horrible Week for Global Socialism

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Washington's Magical Thinking

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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A World That's Coming Unglued

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Morons Who Hate Oil

By Alan Caruba

It may seem harsh to call people who actively spread lies about oil “morons”, but that assumes they do so out of ignorance as opposed to those who do so for some crazed “environmental” reason that is so out of touch with reality it invites scorn.

A case in point is a new book by Steve Hallett with John Wright, “Life Without Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future” ($25.00, Prometheus Books). Suffice to say that Hallett is an associate professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Purdue University while Wright is “a journalist specializing in energy and environmental issues” who is the Latin America news editor for Energy News Today. Wright’s previous book was “The Obama Haters.”

How does Hallet get from botany to a supposed expertise on oil, an energy source more associated with geology? As for Mr. Wright, there is a strong possibility that he is a liberal and an environmentalist, and therefore beyond all hope when it comes to things called FACTS.

The prologue of their book is nauseating in that it regurgitates every environmental lie including “global warming”, a hoax that was revealed in November 2009 to have been the invention of colluding “scientists” working for the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change. Suffice to say their leaked emails demonstrated their panic when the Earth, beginning in 1998, began to cool.

“We seem to have quite a few problems,” wrote the authors. “Global climate change, peak oil, overpopulation, collapsing fisheries, desertification, wealth inequity, species extinctions, freshwater shortages, hapless governments, deforestation, disease epidemics, and agricultural failures top the list.”

Okay, scratch “global climate change” because the climate has been changing for 4.5 billion years on planet Earth, moving between ice ages and warmer periods well known to climatologists and meteorologists. The rest is mostly bogus, but what caught my eye was “wealth inequity” which is not an “environmental” problem, but is the keystone of a document called The Communist Manifesto.

Here’s another gem from their book. “We don’t know exactly when our fossil fuels will run out, but we can predict it to within a few decades. By the end of this century, our oil and natural gas supplies will be virtually nonexistent, and limited coal supplies will be restricted to only a handful of countries.”

Whoa! Does anyone recall how the all those “experts” on global warming kept predicting it was coming in thirty years, fifty years, by the year 3,000? This is the same scam being perpetrated by these two morons. And who is to blame for this coming disaster? “We are to blame.” That’s right, the horrid human race is to blame for this, just as it is for everything else environmentalists want to ban.

There is no denying that we horrible human beings have been using oil now for a while now, primarily since around the 1850s, ever since we discovered its marvelous properties, the energy stored in its molecules, and its extraordinary ability to be part of more than 6,000 products.

A single 42-gallon barrel of oil creates 19.4 gallons of gasoline and the rest is used in the manufacture of motor oil, diesel fuel, floor wax, asphalt, transparent tape, deodorant, dyes, rubber cement, water pipes, aspirin, toothbrushes, heart valves, bandages, and the other 6,000 things we use in some fashion or other. Suffice to say that all plastic begins as oil.

Are we running out of oil? No. Let me repeat. No. There is no such thing as “peak oil” because every time someone has made the prediction that we are using up all the oil, we find some more. This not to say the Obama administration will let oil companies drill for it in America. Not only do we pay less for domestic oil as opposed to importing it, but we have so much domestic oil we wouldn’t have to import it.

There are, for example, 40 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico and estimates of approximately 14 billion barrels off the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts. In the Bakken shale beneath North Dakota, in just the western third of the State it is estimated that there are more than 500 billion barrels that can be extracted.

According to the US Geological Survey and the Minerals Management Service at the Department of Interior that regulates America’s on and off-shore oil reserves, they estimate that America holds more than 21 billion barrels of “proven” conventional oil reserves. Add to this the estimated 100 billion barrels of oil reserves in the postage stamp-sized proposed drilling area of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge.

According to the Congressional Research Service, America’s combined energy resources, oil, coal, and natural gas, are the largest on Earth!

It is insane that Americans will be paying $4, $5 or more for a gallon of gasoline and it is insane to believe environmentalists when they tell you the Earth is running out of oil “by the end of this century.”

It is a kindness to call environmentalists “morons.” They are deliberately lying to everyone, using a massive, international propaganda machine, because in the end they want what Karl Marx and Barack Obama want, a redistribution of your money to other people.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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China is NOT the Future

By Alan Caruba

Last year I read a book, “China’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society” by John and Doris Naisbitt and was so entranced I completely neglected my normal skepticism and missed all the signals that what I was reading was essentially propaganda.

I wonder now how I could have missed this after reading just the first page in which the authors said, “the constancy of the Communist Party has worked not against but for the well-being of the Chinese people. Long-term strategic planning could be carried out without the distractions and disruptions of elections that characterize western democracies.”

Oh, wow! This line from the second paragraph of the book says everything you want to know about its justification of a completely authoritarian system whose brief history has put millions of Chinese in their graves, invaded and occupies Tibet, and is most famous for the slaughter in Tiananmen Square where mostly young Chinese were expressing a desire for real democracy.

The other clue about John Naisbitt is that he is “currently a professor at both Nankai University and Tianjin University of Finance and Economics. His wife has been a professor at Yunnan University and now directs the Naisbitt China Institute in Tianjin. Did I really expect to read a book that was anything but pro-China in every respect?

A new book provides a far different perspective. Troy Parfitt is a Canadian who has lived for years in South Korea and in Taiwan as a teacher of English. He has previously written “Notes on the Other China”, but his new book is titled, “Why China Will Never Rule the World: Travels in the Two Chinas” ($20.95, Western Hemisphere Press, New Brunswick, Canada, softcover). It is, for all intents and purposes, a travelogue of a three-month odyssey the former Taiwan-based author took throughout 17 provinces of China until he could no longer stand being in the Middle Kingdom.

Parfitt is his own man and one with an eye for detail and a talent for describing his journey in ways that do not ignore some obvious and ugly truths about the real China, not the tourist China, and most certainly not the China created by media myths.

He has the added benefit of having actually studied the history of China, past and modern, to the point where the book’s “select bibliography” runs to nearly 70 titles. As much as he made a point of visiting the places a tourist is expected to visit, because he spoke Chinese he was able to speak with the locals along the way in ways most tourists cannot. He was not taken in by the “exotic” aspects of China because he had spent enough time in Asia to have lost any naiveté.

Thus, Parfitt, looking for a description, concludes that China is “the epitome of George Orwell’s most famous novel. It is ‘Nineteen-Eighty Four with Chinese characteristics.”

Orwell’s book is about an authoritarian future ruled by Big Brother where truth is what the state says it is. It is a world inhabited by “proles” who are not encouraged to have any thoughts other than those approved by the state. It is, in short, Communism.

“China’s great rise is a great illusion,” says Parfitt. “Modernization in Chinese society is little more than window-dressing, the welding of superficial constructs—Pepsi signs, department stores, state-of-the-art production methods—onto an antique mindset. To say that China is rising is exceedingly vague. To say that it is already great or slated for greatness is a mindless mantra at best and a cheap marketing ploy at worst.”

One is brought up short when told that “China’s economic advances are certainly impressive, although it’s important to remember that foreign companies are responsible for roughly 60 percent of all Chinese exports and 85 percent of all high-tech exports.” (Emphasis added)

And then Parfitt adds, “Politically, culturally, socially, and historically, China has practically nothing to offer the Western world…or any other non-Confucian country or culture.”

“China does not even meet the definition of a developed state,” notes Parfitt. “As of 2009, it was listed on the United Nations Human Development Index as being in the 92nd spot.”

“Chinese culture remains locked in a self-replicating state of chaos, myopia, inefficiency, intolerance, violence, and irrationality. It is, in a word, backward,” says Parfitt. “China may be embracing Western trends and technology, but so what? It’s been doing that for more than a century. Culturally, and psychologically, it remains anchored to the distant past.”

For my part, I have long thought that a nation with 1.3 billion people is not likely to function well under the best of circumstances, even with the most enlightened leadership. If you want to see a country that has real potential to emerge in a leadership position among nations, look instead to India which had the great good fortune of being a British colony long enough to adopt its best qualities.

If the U.S. ever gets around to reducing its hideous debt and, in particular, reducing the amount of it owned by China, we may also begin to treat China more realistically. In the meantime, let’s not romanticize China.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Obama, As Red as It Gets

By Alan Caruba

Isn’t it about time that the mainstream media and all others begin to examine the record and conclude that a Communist holds the reins of power in the White House?

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, it is often believed that Communism died with it. Not so, Communism is alive and well in China, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela.

From the days of Harry Truman who discovered that Franklin Roosevelt had given the Soviets Eastern Europe at the WWII Yalta Conference, American presidents have steadfastly done what they believed was required to keep Communism “contained.”; some more successfully than others.

The Communist Manifesto is well worth reading. Among its planks is the abolition of private property and a government that owns or controls much of the U.S. landmass is antithetical to this keystone of capitalism.

The Manifesto calls for “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax." It calls for the centralization of credit in the hands of the state. We have a “Federal Reserve” that is a national bank.

It calls for “centralization of the means of communications and transportation.” We have a Federal Communications Commission. There’s more and you can read about it here.

America has never had a Communist President until now.

While others have written how obvious it is that Obama is a “Socialist”, I think this is a matter of caution in a society that has not seriously used the word “Communist” since the 1950s when entities like the House Un-American Activities Committee actively investigated and exposed how many existed in the government, the unions, and Hollywood.

It’s not like Barack Hussein Obama has come out and said, “Yes, I’m a Communist”, but you don’t have to have a PhD in Political Science to connect the dots. The process is made murky by the way Obama has deliberately covered his tracks wherever he could, while dropping broad hints.

Obama is the classic “red diaper” baby, the result of a union between his mother, Stanley Dunham and Barack Obama Sr., memorialized in “Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.” However, Jerome Corsi, the author of “Obama Nation” notes that “we are told by Obama outright…that much of the autobiography is not factually true, at least not as written.” Indeed, much of what Obama has had to write or say of his life is fiction of one sort or another.

His father abandoned his mother, returning to Africa “to live the life of a chronic alcoholic.” He was also “a man of the left.” Obama’s mother remarried and took him off to Indonesia, but other than developing a fondness of Islam, not much is known of that period. A second divorce put Obama in the care of his grandparents in Hawaii and it was there where his most formative development occurred.

In his excellent book, “Dupes”, historian Dr. Paul Kengor traces the role of the former Soviet Union and the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) as it developed both spies and “fellow travelers” devoted to turning the U.S. toward Communism.

Towards its end the book traces the most important influences in the life of President Obama. The conclusion that he is a Communist is unavoidable.

Obama’s grandparents were devoted to socialism, raising their daughter in schools known for it, even attending a church that reflected it. They were close friends with Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the CPUSA and an Afro-American. Dr. Kengor noted that, during the 1970s, the period of Obama’s adolescence, “His impact is profound because he mentored a young man who made it all the way to the White House.”

Among the hints Obama drops in “Dreams of My Father” was a reference to his college years “hanging out with Marxist professors”, attending “socialist conferences”, and discussing “neocolonialism.” Dr. Kengor quotes Dr. John Drew, a contemporary of Obama at Occidental College for whom Obama was “as a fellow Marxist” and said of the President, “Obama was already an ardent Marxist when I met (him) in the fall of 1980.”

After graduating from Columbia University, long a hotbed of a Leftist faculty and students indoctrinated with a liberal political philosophy, and later Harvard Law School, Obama moved to Chicago where he became close friends with former far-Left Weatherman terrorists of the 1960s, Bill Ayers and his wife Benardine Dohrn. His first venture into politics took place in a fund-raiser in their home. Obama attended a Black Liberation church in Chicago led by Rev. Jeremiah Wright who rarely had a good word for America. Ayers calls himself “a communist with a small ‘c’.”

Among those chosen to be in his administration was Van Jones, “an avowed communist” named as Obama’s “green jobs czar.” When exposed, he resigned. Another figure of the far Left was Jeff Jones whose consulting firm, the Apollo Alliance, “helped write President Obama’s budget-bursting $800 billion ‘stimulus’ bill passed by Congress shortly into the Obama presidency.”

For those still in denial, consider an article by Stanislav Mishin that appeared in Pravda, the Russian newspaper that was formerly one of the main organs of the Soviet Union. “It must be said that like the breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed, against the backdrop of a passive, hapless sheep”, much of which he attributed to “the election of Barack Obama.”

That was written before the spontaneous explosion of the quintessentially American Tea Party movement. Since then we have seen the dramatic reversal of power in Congress that occurred as the result of the November 2010 elections.

The harm and damage done by our first Communist President will take years to repair, but Americans have wakened to

• the socialist menace of the nation’s public sector unions,

• the centralization of education in the federal government,

• the threat of the Environmental Protection Agency’s assertion of control over America’s energy sector,

• the refusal of the Interior Department to grant drilling permits,

• the devaluation of the U.S. dollar by the Federal Reserve,

• and the incremental efforts of an anti-American government to undermine defense, national security, our economy, and our worldwide reputation as a defender of freedom.

Winston Churchill, the former British Prime Minister who led that nation through World War II and coined the term “Iron Curtain”, said of Communism, “it is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Obama, As Red as It Gets

Duped! Relentless Marxist Deception

By Alan Caruba

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

Those of my age—I am in my seventies—have a strong recall of the Cold War, fought from the end of World War Two in 1945 until the fall of the infamous Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. We grew up knowing that the Communists—Marxists—were the enemy.

All throughout that period, American liberals—Leftists—did what they could to ridicule efforts to rid the government of Communists, attacked those like Sen. Joseph McCarthy who spoke out against them, defended the likes of Fidel Castro who turned Cuba into a prison-state, and worked to “improve” U.S.-Soviet relations.

A book I wish everyone would read, liberals and conservatives alike, “Dupes” by Paul Kengor, went into a second printing in January of this year (ISI Books, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Wilmington, DE). Kengor, a PhD, is a professor of political science at Grove City College. His book runs just over 600 pages, all thoroughly documented, and tells the history of the effort to impose communism on America and worldwide, dating back to the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

One of the characters in the book is Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet spy who came to realize how evil Communism was and who revealed how the administrations of Roosevelt and Truman were shot through with spies and those cooperating with the Soviet Union, the most famous of whom was Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official. Richard M. Nixon first came to public notice as a Senator from California who ran on an anti-Communist platform.

“While Communists make full use of liberals and their solicitudes, and sometimes flatter them to their faces, in private,” wrote Chambers, “they treat them with that sneering contempt that the strong and predatory almost invariably feel for victims who volunteer to help in their own victimization.”

Socialism has had a long, hard time establishing itself in America and has mostly been the gift of the Democratic Party that held control of Congress for forty years until that grip was broken in 1995. Despite that, Bill Clinton was reelected and, halfway through George W. Bush’s second term, congressional power returned to the Democrats.

Then, in 2008, a virtually unknown Senator who had not even served a full term, who had no paper trail of documentation regarding his life, who had written two memoirs that hinted at his far Left upbringing and associations, was elected President. Putting it bluntly, Americans were duped.

As Kengor points out, Americans “in poll after poll, year after year, have described themselves as ‘conservative’ over ‘liberal’ by a margin of roughly two to one, by approximately 40 percent to 20 percent.”

The political environment of America is conservative, but it has been the growing number of independent voters that have determined election outcomes. That says something about the disappointment that both political parties have created with their emphasis on enlarging the federal government, excessive spending, questionable wars, and general indifference to the voters.

The independents also reflect the sudden emergence of the Tea Party movement that occurred to protest Obamacare. They and others have swung back toward conservative candidates electing Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia, a Republican Senator from Massachusetts, and sent Allen West and Marco Rubio to Congress from Florida, along with a host of candidates supported by the Tea Parties.

Independents along with conservatives in America have been demonstrating a level of political resistance to senseless spending and the rough-shod imposition of leftist legislation that suggests the 2012 elections will “save” America from Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and their far Left minions.

The election of Barack Obama was the result of the greatest act of political deception in the modern era. It was aided by a news media that not only ignored all the obvious signs that Obama was a denizen of the far Left, but was surrounded, not only by Leftists, but Communists like Van Jones whose Apollo Alliance helped write Obama’s budget-bursting $800 billion ‘stimulus’ bill.

The revolutionaries of the 1960s had mostly migrated to positions in higher education where they could influence a new generation, oblivious to the carnage that has always accompanied a Communist revolution, killing millions. Younger Americans in 2008 meant that those aged 18 to 29 made up nearly one in five voters or about twenty-five million ballots. They preferred Obama by a margin of more than two to one, 66 percent to 32 percent. They had no memory of the Cold War.

Seeking to dupe Americans Obamacare was an act of raw political power that ignored the same widespread rejection that an earlier version, dubbed “Hillarycare”, had encountered. “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it,” said then Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Its purpose was to completely socialize healthcare in America.

Americans, old and young, must not be duped again. The very future of the nation depends on the actions of a Republican-controlled House in the years remaining as America’s first Marxist President works his way, seeking always to make dupes of us all.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Duped! Relentless Marxist Deception

The "One" Returns

By Alan Caruba

OZYMANDIAS
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Occasionally, when I am watching or listening to Barack Hussein Obama, I am reminded of the poem, “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Shelley was an English romantic poet who hung out with Lord Byron and John Keats, all authentic literary giants. Shelley died at age 30 from drowning. Bryon contracted a fever, dying in Greece at the age of 36. Poor Keats died at age 26. All were dead by 1824. Rediscovered by later generations, they gained immortality.

“Ozymandias” is a poem about a life of over-weaning pride that ends poorly and forgotten. Obama has the first part down. After all, he wrote two memoirs about his life and deep thoughts before he was elected to be the junior U.S. Senator from Illinois in 2004.

By 2007 Obama hit the presidential campaign trail and ended Hillary (and Bill) Clinton’s dreams of returning to the White House. He gave her a consolation prize. He then defeated yet another lame Republican candidate simply by showing up, being younger, and being able to read a TelePrompter better.

What Obama’s campaign is now remembered for is Rev. Jeremiah Wright, telling Joe the Plumber he wanted to redistribute everyone’s wealth, and for throwing his grandma under the bus.

From a very young age, Obama believed he would become President. It might better be called a fixation or obsession.

Obama only met his birth father once in 1971 at age ten, but here again this idea of fixation plays a role. In reality his father was a bigamist (he had a wife or two back in Kenya when he married Obama’s momma), a drunk (he died behind the wheel while soused), and fancied a political career in Kenya that never materialized. One of Obama’s two memoirs was titled “Dreams From My Father.” Yeah, sure.

After Obama Senior, his mother married an Indonesian who adopted their son. His formative years were spent there until his mother divorced again and shipped Barack to Hawaii to be raised by his white grandparents. Progressives, they were friends with Frank Marshall Davis, a communist, one of Obama’s many very left wing influences and associates over the years.

I think that, early on, Obama decided to become the communist messiah to America, but like all communists, he kept that part of his political philosophy a secret from the voters, while dropping hints of it in his memoirs.

When Obama returns from his vacation in Hawaii, he is going to face the toughest two years of his life. Not since 1946 have the voters turned so deliberately on a Democrat president. In 2010 they voted in a Republican majority to the House and narrowed the Democrat margin in the Senate.

Obama called it “a shellacking” but it is better described as a rejection.

Other presidents in the modern era lost their party’s majorities in Congress. Clinton comes to mind and, of course, George W. Bush. Obama’s loss was more than just political, it was personal.

Beyond Congress Obama will have to deal with a vibrant, energized movement, the Tea Party that intends to ensure the Republicans trim government spending and turn back the policy gains Obama put in place with Obamacare at the top of the list.

As far as the rest of the world’s movers and shakers are concerned, Obama is little more than a charming cocktail party guest with little to offer than small talk and leftist bromides.

Only one thing is certain. Obama will be running for re-election the minute he returns to Washington, but he is going to need more than his former vacuous “hope and change” motto and there is small chance of that. In a very real way, the nation has already moved beyond him.

When I see Obama these days, I think of Jimmy Carter, a pathetic former president soundly rejected by the voters, the “author” of endless, largely unread books, and grateful that anyone takes notice of him.

When you see Jimmy Carter today, you’re looking at Barack Obama in fifteen or twenty years.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → The "One" Returns

Adrift on an Ocean of Lies

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His use of Teleprompters became a national joke.

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → Adrift on an Ocean of Lies