A Nod to Theo for the article.
By Alan Caruba
It has taken three and a half years into Barack Obama’s presidency for most Americans to realize that he has been deliberately destroying America by driving up the nation’s debt and deficit, reducing privately held wealth, forcing millions onto the public dole, undermining its moral structure, and weakening the nation’s reputation internationally..
His latest lie is that “the private sector is doing just fine”, but the numbers tell the whole story and one can find them on an excellent blog, Economic Collapse, that offers seventy examples:
— The official U.S. unemployment rate has been above eight percent (8%) for 40 months in a row. Unofficially, it is estimated to be closer to fifteen percent (15%).
— In 2007, about ten percent (10%) of all unemployed Americans had been out of work for 52 weeks or longer. Today that number is above thirty percent (30%).
— An astounding forty-nine percent (49%) of all Americans live in a home where at least one member is receiving government benefits.
— The middle class is shrinking. Ninety-five percent (95%) of the jobs lost during the current recession were middle class jobs.
— Instead of cutting spending to reduce debt, the Federal Reserve is “monetizing” much of the U.S. debt. It purchased “approximately sixty-one percent (61%) of all government debt issued by the U.S. Treasury in 2011.
— Perhaps the most frightening statistic cited was a survey that found that sixty-three percent (63%) of Americans “believe that the U.S. economic model is broken.”
It is not broken. The economic model that propelled America into a superpower would continue to provide prosperity if the nation’s “entitlement” programs were reformed, if the obscene government spending and production of regulations were reduced, if government housing finance entitles such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were eliminated, if the federal government’s purchase of the nation’s land mass was ended, if environmental laws without any basis in science were struck from the books, and if government control over the exploration and extracting of its vast energy reserves was greatly reduced.
It’s a tall order and it would require cleaning out a Congress that has imposed unsustainable burdens, including the highest corporate income tax in the world, and a level of taxation that requires those still holding jobs to annually work 107 days to earn enough money to pay local, state, and federal taxes.
If you check out the Progressive Caucus website, you will find nearly seventy members of the House are members and there is one from the Senate, the Socialist Bernie Sanders. In the 1950s they would have correctly been identified as Communists.
When Liberals and liberalism became unpopular, they began using the term Progressives. They are the descendents of every Democrat that voted for the New Deal, the War on Poverty, the creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the creation of the Departments of Energy, Education, and the Environmental Protection Agency. These are the people who in the early years of the last century imposed the income tax and engineered the creation of the Federal Reserve, a banking cartel that controls the economy.
At this point most conservatives have heard of Saul Alinksy’s 1972 book, “Rules for Radicals”, a guide to bringing about the destruction of the nation’s capitalist economic system and replace it with the kind of government that Barack Obama has tried to impose with the help of the many Communists and liberals in Congress.
Lesser known is the roadmap spelled out in 1988 by Columbia University sociologists, Richard Andrew Cloward and his wife Frances Fox Piven, both members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” advocated a “massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls” in order to sabotage it and bring about “a political and financial crisis.” As it turned out, it was the collapse of the housing market that brought about the financial crisis they wanted, but following the Bush administration emergency bail-out of the banking system, the Obama administration with its Democrat-controlled Congress set about imposing historic debt through its $821 billion “stimulus.” Present debt exceeds the entire annual Gross Domestic Product.
It followed that with an unnecessary and wasteful bail-out of General Motors and Chrysler (instead of permitting a normal bankruptcy that would diminish the power of the unions that brought it about), and massive “investments” in failed solar and other alternative energy companies. The EPA was set free to try to impose regulations that would shut down a major portion of the nation’s producers of electricity.
Even though voters returned majority power to Republicans in the House of Representatives in 2010 the trail of destruction has continued and the bills they have passed to end our present financial troubles have been locked up in a Democrat-controlled Senate that has not passed a budget in the last three years.
We are now five months from an election to remove Obama from power and electing conservative lawmakers to office. It’s a start in restoring America to its former prosperity.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
