This year we celebrate once again the anniversary of our declaration of independence from the British Empire. 2011 is the 235th time we have marked July 4th and on Monday, as we mark it again we are far and away the richest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen.
No other country has ever achieved what we have, in terms of military strength, in terms of economic wealth or in terms of personal freedoms. Our grand experiment in a new form of government has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. We have the right to be proud. And yet this year there is something hollow, something mournful, something apprehensive about it all.
It shouldn’t be that way. It wasn’t always that way. It doesn’t have to stay that way.
Those of you who are old enough, think back to the glorious feelings that followed the surrender of Germany and Japan. We were the principal victor in the greatest conflict in the history of the planet. And even though things soon deteriorated into the Cold War and we feared the threat of nuclear holocaust, still we knew in our hearts that we would win out in the end.
Think of the summer of 1969 when we turned back the challenge of Soviet space technology. The United States put men on the moon and brought them back safely to the earth. Then we did it again and again. It has been 42 year since all Americans thrilled at that victory and since then who but Americans has walked on the surface of our moon?
No one but us.
Recall our bicentennial and the splendid arrival of the Tall Ships in New York harbor. It was a hard time. The nation was reeling from the shameful end of the Viet Nam war and suffering from a stagnant economy amidst rising inflation. But didn’t those high-masted ships raise your spirits? Didn’t that moment remind you of what we had been, what we still were and how things could be again?
When Ronald Reagan stormed onto the scene, waving Old Glory and calling on us to be once again that shining city on a hill, we were ready, we were eager for his message. Somehow his message helped us to restore our honor, our belief in ourselves and in our capacity as a people to rebuild our damaged economy. And it worked.
When Ronald Reagan stormed onto the scene, waving Old Glory and calling on us to be once again that shining city on a hill, we were ready, we were eager for his message. Somehow his message helped us to restore our honor, our belief in ourselves and in our capacity as a people to rebuild our damaged economy. And it worked.
At the same time his policies drove the Soviet Union beyond its limits. Remember our astonishment in 1989 and 1990 as the Soviet communist party lost more and more power, the Soviet people seized economic and political freedoms and then finally, in September 1991, their whole empire just imploded?
George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachov did a brilliant job of managing the collapse of a major empire without widespread violence, a very rare thing in human history. Then Bush declared that, with the USSR fallen, a new world order was upon us. And somehow, at about that point, we seemed to lose our way.
Perhaps we had simply failed to plan for what sort of post-Soviet world we wanted. After all, Washington has always been better at putting out fires than preventing them. Or perhaps we could not come to terms with the fact that the United States by itself cannot define, establish and maintain a new world order. Maybe we were just uncomfortable being a crusader without a crusade.
There has always been a strong isolationist streak in the United States which has manifested itself after every one of our military victories. As for me, I think our problems started earlier than that. I think a good part of it was that we proved over the post WWII decades unable to handle our success. Certainly we showed ourselves willing to slough off the hard disciplined work habits we had learned during the Great Depression and the war as we rushed to enjoy the fruits of our victories – a trait which we continued long after our own share of those fruits was consumed.
As we took our long post-war ease, as we relaxed our vigilance and softened our discipline, new rivals and new threats appeared. I speak of Islamic terrorism and the dangers to our economic survival from the national debt and the risk of loss of the dollar’s global reserve standing.
And the saddest thing is we have helped to magnify these threats through our own inattention and indifference, our own loss of self-reliance and growth of dependence on government. Successive administrations and congresses may have led our country into this current mess, but We the People also failed in our responsibility to remain informed and involved – to keep our government on the right path. So we bear some of the responsibility for that mess. That said, we also bear some of the responsibility for cleaning up the mess. And we can do it.
In the immortal words of former comic strip figure Pogo Possum, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Pogo should have gone on to say, “We have also met our salvation and he is us too.”
Relearn the art of war
Part of our present problem lies in how we approach war.
The American people properly abhor war and have traditionally been reluctant to make war. This is all to the good. Anyone who has seen war will tell you that it is a nasty brutish business where the glory resides in the telling rather than in the combat. War is the great devourer of resources, human, physical and financial. And when the fighting is done all of the participants are poorer for it. Yet war is a legitimate tool of international relations and is sometimes forced upon us.
In recent decades American political leaders have wanted to fight wars with the smallest possible military commitment in order to reduce both casualties and expenditures. They seem to have forgotten, or perhaps they never learned, that war is not a sporting event and you cannot win wars on the cheap.
In recent decades American political leaders have wanted to fight wars with the smallest possible military commitment in order to reduce both casualties and expenditures. They seem to have forgotten, or perhaps they never learned, that war is not a sporting event and you cannot win wars on the cheap.
The objective of fighting a war – any war - is to win.
Before the first shot is fired you have to define your goals and plan out both the military campaign and its aftermath. We can count on our superb military to complete this task down to the last bullet. Unless restrained, our warriors will strike the enemy at his weakest point, in the shortest period of time with the maximum amount of force, They will strike him again and again until he collapses under the sheer weight of the catastrophe we have brought upon him. And then, as the smoke clears, at bayonet point they will tell the enemy how things are going to be.
This is called victory. When wars are fought in this way they are shorter, they cost less and casualties of all kinds are fewer.
Note the First Gulf War for the results of a war conducted in this way. But it is the civilian side of the leadership which has the more complex job of determining what must happen after the fighting stops, how to achieve those ends and where the resources to support post-conflict goals will come from.
Examine our experience in the Second Gulf War to see what happens when the latter task is not completed.
In Libya the Obama Administration has pushed the concept of lackadaisical warfare to a new low. Now we find ourselves engaged half heartedly in an unnecessary conflict involving none of our vital national interests and an apparent absence of desire for victory. Other than a vague statement that Qaddafi must go there seems to be no defined combat goal and no idea whatever of what Libya should look like after the fighting or how to bring the new Libya about.
This fight should have been over in a few days. Instead Obama’s ludicrous approach to warfare - akin to egging two other kids to fight on the playground – has produced a longer conflict with many more dead and wounded and much wider destruction than would have been the case if the conflict had been fought to win.
Obama’s war in Libya would be a joke were it not for the dying and destruction. We celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks. Those lights and explosions represent the cannon and rockets of the best of the British navy when they tried and failed miserably to bomb Fort McHenry into submission.
On the Fourth we proudly mark that American victory and all the many victories that followed. So of course we are apprehensive and uncertain today when we realize that our government apparently does not care about winning but makes military decisions based on what they think is most likely to help them get re-elected.
The American People have sacrificed for centuries to make our military into the finest fighting force in the history of warfare, strong enough to defeat any conceivable combination of enemies. They must not be misused.
Our leaders of both parties need to be made to understand that we will not countenance the sacrifice of American blood and treasure for anything less than victory. If we do not intend to win, do not get involved. It is for us, the American People, to instruct our leaders.
When we do, when we force them to listen, we will regain the self-respect and self confidence that enabled us to build this country.
Restore economic sanity
In earlier writings I have stressed that our country’s fiscal problems began in 1944, with the signature of the Breton Woods accord which, among other things, made the dollar the global reserve currency. In fact, it was FDR whose socialist programs jumped up federal spending from its traditional 3% of GDP to some 44% in mid-1945.
In fairness, a good part of that increase was due to the costs of the war, but successive administrations and congresses were able to return spending to a rational level due to increased tax revenues during the post-war boom. Still the temptation to use our global reserve status to borrow money cheaper than anyone else was just too great to be ignored by either party and our annual deficits began to creep inexorably upward.
Politicians of both parties made promises they could not fund from tax receipts but there seemed to be no end of cheap borrowable money available with no immediate financial consequences, especially in the early years when most of our bonds were sold to American citizens.
It was Lyndon Johnson who, thinking to create a lasting voting base for the Democratic Party, laid the groundwork for today’s threat of bankruptcy through creation of the Medicare and Medicaid programs. He knew at the time that our aging population and rising medical costs would one day make it impossible to fund these programs, but he and other politicians reasoned IBG-YBG (I’ll Be Gone-You’ll Be Gone) before that happens.
Meantime, millions of Americans would have become dependent upon these and other forms of Great Society government handouts and would bless the Democratic Party for giving them these ‘entitlements.” Our debt began to ramp upward faster, but there was a limit on how fast it could grow imposed by the fact that our T-Bills (debt instruments) could be redeemed for gold by foreign creditors. The faster we spent, the more gold flew out the door and, by 1971, it was clear that one day soon the vaults at Fort Knox would be empty.
This was the point where then-President Richard Nixon could have reversed the tide, but he was afraid of the political heat. Rather than try to reduce welfare and “entitlement” spending, he chose the politically safe option and delinked the dollar from gold. Once that was done it was Katie bar the door! Now Congress and the Treasury could print money as fast as they liked in whatever amounts they liked and no one ever stopped to think (or if they did they didn’t care) that someday there would have to be a reckoning.
By the time Ronald Reagan came to power the second generation of Johnson’s welfare beneficiaries was drawing checks. That and Reagan’s increased military spending to force the Soviets into fiscal collapse from trying to keep up with us pushed the debt and the annual deficits up much faster.
After that the debt level never moved any way but up. The pace slowed a bit during the hi-tech bubble of the Clinton years when tax revenues exploded upward but the wars and security enhancements following 9/11 and President George Bush’s unfunded prescription drug benefit program (yet another “entitlement”) continued the upward spiral.
How could it be otherwise? Once we were the “arsenal of democracy” but our manufacturing capacity has largely moved abroad where costs of production are lower.
Today we could not hope to ramp up our production to approach that of World War II. We could not even match the effort we made during the First Gulf War.
Think about it: Some 70% of our economic activity comes from consumption. But the flip side of consumption is production – someone has to produce what is consumed. If 70% of our economy is consumption that means only 30% is production. If production and consumption have to balance out, we have to import another 40% in production, almost exactly the percentage of our annual budget which is presently borrowed through sale of Treasury bonds.
Ideally, we should produce more than we consume so that we can benefit from export income. How long do you think a nation can continue when it consumes 40% more than it produces year after year? How long could your family survive if every year you spend 40% more than you make?
Think about it: In the United States today, almost half the people pay no income tax. Some 47% of the people receive food stamps. The government pays more money out to the people than it takes in taxes. In some cases there are as many as three generations of families who have always lived on government welfare. These people have become dependent on government handouts to which they have learned to believe that they are entitled. They have no skin in the national game and understandably support whichever politician offers them a larger handout.
I don’t blame them.
I blame the government which enables them to live off the rest of us. But this essay is not about blame. It is about how, on this Fourth of July, our sense of trouble stems from massive government mismanagement which we, through our indolence and indifference, helped to make possible. And it is about how We The People must reach inside ourselves to retake the role the Founders set out for us, sovereign in these United States.
It was only a matter of time before our weak and indebted economy was crashed by some sort of shock. In this case, it was the collapse of the housing bubble created by government law and regulation, the greed of large investment bankers and hedge fund managers and a system which, to paraphrase one of America’s most important economic advisors, piles financial risk on the public sector and the taxpayer while handing the profits to selected private sector moguls.
Even before the crash of 2008 and the $700 billion TARP bill, our annual deficit was some $500 billion. In fairness, the government probably will get most of its TARP expenditures back, but still it cannot be denied that President Obama inherited a difficult financial situation.
Nevertheless, he was elected to make things better and, instead, his ruinous spending, his failed stimulus, his relentless attacks on the most productive business elements of our society and his unending efforts to expand the intrusive reach of government regulation over the lives of all Americans have made things many orders of magnitude worse.
Those of you who read my blogs know that I loathe Barack Obama because I believe him to be a Marxist who wants to wreck our economy so that he can build an intrusive, authoritarian and controlling leftist state on what remains of our economic and political systems.
Those of you who read my blogs know that I loathe Barack Obama because I believe him to be a Marxist who wants to wreck our economy so that he can build an intrusive, authoritarian and controlling leftist state on what remains of our economic and political systems.
But whether Obama is a Marxist or something else it cannot be denied that all of his economic policies have failed to pull the country out of recession. Unemployment remains at 9.1%, housing values continue to fall, new unemployment claims continue to rise and credit remains very hard to come by.
Until last week, the Fed was monetizing the debt with both hands and, now that it has quit, the interest we pay on bonds (and thus on the national debt) as well as related domestic interest rates, are expected to rise. Before long the Fed will resume debt monetization.
In my opinion, even the government’s claims of a weak recovery are not true. This is because they lie about the true rate of inflation, which they rate at about 3.2%. If they had not changed the way in which inflation is scored, in order to make the government look better, they would have to admit that inflation is running at about 8.8%.
This would mean that the economy is not growing, it is in fact declining and we are still in recession. Many years of fiscal mismanagement, made far worse by Obama’s destructive policies and combined with the desire of a number of the world’s other trading nations (who fear that we can never repay our debt to them) to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency leave us facing the greatest threat to national survival since the Civil War.
We are literally sitting on the beach watching the tsunami build on the horizon. Under these circumstances it is no wonder that the people feel that something is desperately wrong.
There is very little time remaining but thank God – and yes I do mean GOD – that our political system will still allow us to bring our government to heel and push it back on the right track.
Stand and be counted
Now, this Independence Day, is the time for us to rise above our troubles and concerns. We are the builders, the producers. We are the people who every day remake and sustain this great nation. We, not Obama’s socialists, are the ones we have been waiting for. We were here all the time but we were quiet, perhaps dozing.
People - awake and arise! Shout out !
The time is upon us to prepare for the great crusade of 2012. This is our chance, maybe our last chance, to return America to the principles and traditions which made it great and which, once restored, can guide it to new and more splendrous heights.
Act now! Stand with that brave Republican minority in Washington, who stem the Red tide and resist the efforts of those who would drive our country into collapse and our people into servitude to an authoritarian government.
When you do, when the People win, you will have new victories to celebrate – these over a threat from within. When you do, the fireworks on the Fourth will glow a little brighter, the beer and barbeque will taste better and your pride as an American will be restored and strengthened.
The choice is clear – fight to save your country or watch it fall.
Stanley Escudero July 2, 2011NSBNews.net, also known as VolusiaNews.net, provides Volusia County 24 / 7 Internet newspaper coverage, 100% free with breaking news, news of record and investigative reports from New Smyrna Beach, FL, for a 21st-century digital world.