The Obama Depression in one chart
Methinks the conventional wisdom regarding the new, Obama-era definition of “Recovery” needs an update…
h/t: ZH
In her recent remarks honoring the life of M. Stanton Evans, Diana West asks The Question:
If we as a society have for half a century gotten practically everything wrong about McCarthy, … what else have we gotten wrong?
Indeed.
As it turns out, this question has been answered, at least in part, and at least with respect to the mystery surrounding what has become an existential threat hanging, virtually unacknowledged, over the head of every U.S. Citizen at this moment: how did the descendants and heirs of those who freed themselves from elitist tyranny and who established the first nation founded on the principle of a Republican Form of Government, come to find themselves living in an empire of conscripted, vassal provinces, conquered States and violently annexed territories, ruled by an oligarchy in Washington, D.C. whose hegemony is maintained through the illusion of “two-party democracy” as a carrot, and backed up by the lingering threat of military force as the stick?
There is no denying that Evans’ work was – and remains – indispensible. Yet the revelations produced by his scholarship shed light on only one relatively small facet of a much larger, ongoing, grand theft of liberty, prosperity, property and… destiny. That crime has yet to be publicly revealed in its fullness. At the present rate of decline in this once-great nation, it may never be revealed.
The players unmasked in Evans’ game-changing magnum opus were successful in manipulating the levers of power, which direct the activities and fortunes of the United States’ vast, diverse, resource- and talent-rich populace, for one simple reason: there was (and is) only one lever over which they needed to seize control – The Federal Government.
How did this happen? How did it become an almost trivial exercise to subvert the character of an entire nation?
The Founders’ vision – i.e., a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that government which has usurped authority over the limits of its own authority inexorably leads to an Omnipotent State – was made manifest through the ratification of a Constitution painstakingly constructed to defend the individual sovereign Citizen against tyranny from a monarchy or oligarchy far away. The result was a nation comprised of autonomous, sovereign States, whose individual governments served at the pleasure of their sovereign Citizens who, in turn, exercised direct control over the laws by which they agreed to live and who, also, maintained the freedom to remove themselves from one State and relocate to another whose social organization more closely fit their individual preferences. Operative word in that last sentence: was. The Republic and associated Free Marketplace of Ideas, established as the manifestation of the Founders’ vision, ceased to be long ago. Well over a century ago.
So, back to “what else have we gotten wrong?” Simple.
We as a nation have failed to honestly acknowledge the specific acts, crimes, corruption, deceit and democide through which our sovereign ancestors and their society were fundamentally transformed into a “national citizenry” of federal tax slaves, whose State governments and local institutions are routinely overruled by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats thousands of miles away, whose economy and money are under the complete control of a private banking plutocracy, and whose property is literally forfeit as and whenever the whim of a ruling elite should deem it so.
Not to take anything away from Stan’s herculean effort, but it’s a testament to the enormity of this larger conundrum that he was only able to locate and report on one small, defaced and discarded piece of a much larger puzzle – one that, once assembled, reveals a history of propaganda, state religion, indoctrination, criminal misfeasance, usurpation of authority and ongoing, highly organized theft of private property going back at least 150 years.
The historian, journalist, social scientist or common citizen who fully documents and finally demonstrates the reality behind this mystery will no doubt be demonized in ways that will make even McCarthy’s harshest critics blush. That’s because the facts – which are actually freely accessible to anyone today – drive a jackhammer into the foundation of secular religion and impenetrable propaganda upon which worship of the leviathan federal State is built. People like Tom DiLorenzo and others with the courage to investigate and write about this topic have gotten a small taste of this abuse from hypocrites, cherry-picking pseudo-historians and unabashed Lincoln idolators such as Rich Lowry.
Fixing what we’ve gotten wrong about this issue begins by asking a simple question: what made it so easy for Communists to achieve what they did? How and when did the decentralized United States’ governance, which should have made their task virtually impossible, morph into a corrupted form that gave Stalin’s agents not only a place to stand, but a lever long enough to move the entire United States in the socially suicidal direction of statist collectivism?
The answer to this question has become obvious to me, discussed in various contexts here, here and here.
But what do you think?
One caveat, however: comments containing the standard, knee-jerk baseless accusations, including but not limited to, “you’re just a Confederate sympathizer”, “you want to bring back slavery”, “but… slavery”, “Slavery!!!”, “SLAAAAAAVERY!!!!!!“, “you’re a RAAAAAACIST!!!!“, etc., not only won’t be published, but the email address(es) used to post them will be sold to as many SPAM mills as I can find. Just so we have that understanding.
My ancestors ALL came to America long after the so-called “Civil” War ended; I’ve never lived in, nor do I have any family in the South, and I’ve probably read more material on the ante- and post-bellum U.S. than any 10 people I know, combined. My one and only motivation with respect to this topic is to expose the reality behind the fork in the road which has led this nation to the brink of an abyss. So please spare yourself the embarrassment, and spare the rest of us your juvenile, a-historical, serially debunked “South seceded to preserve their right to keep slaves” drivel. The debate is not “over”; the history is not “settled”.
Like the facts uncovered by American Hero Stanton Evans, the facts that indisputably show what else we’ve gotten wrong are out their, waiting for you to simply consider them. Consider these facts from within the context of a nation that is in steep decline due to exactly the sort of governmental abuse and usurpation of authority the Founders sought to avoid. The challenge facing 21st century U.S. Citizens – the choice, really – is to either trace back along our history to identify where their forebears abandoned the path laid out by the Founders’ vision… or continue over the abyss. This is an invitation to consciously and objectively examine that choice.
One might think that with the recent evisceration of Brian Williams, for blatantly lying about his experiences in his professional capacity as a news anchor, the media would be a bit more circumspect when it comes to the facts… at least until this latest case of the moral adolescents eating their own blows over.
Not so.
Today – more than 12 years after Congress passed bipartisan authorization for the use of military force in Iraq – NYT is still clinging desperately to the repeatedly debunked “Bush Lied” meme.
Lying liar Jeremy Peters claims:
“Congress has not voted to give a president formal authority for a military operation since 2002 when it backed George W. Bush in his campaign to strike Iraq after his administration promoted evidence, since discredited, that Saddam Hussein’s government possessed unconventional weapons.”
Since “discredited”??
No, sonny, it was actually quite well-established that Saddam not only maintained an array of “unconventional” weapons, but was busily reconstituting the means to manufacture more, using funds and under cover of the diversionary activity provided by his friends in the U.N. (France, Russia, et al.). This was later confirmed by the IIC – chaired by Paul Volcker – which uncovered the “Oil-For-Food” deception, and also confirmed by the Duelfer Report. These are publicly available findings that are never, ever mentioned by the statist propagandists at NYT, unless they’re lying about them.
The Bush administration wasn’t promoting “evidence”, they promoted the same “imminent threat” line that was considered perfectly valid when it was broadcast by Clinton and his various supporters and hyped 24/7 by infomedia peddlers like CNN, all of whom were quite rabidly gung-ho to invade Iraq… until Matt Drudge broke the Lewinsky scandal and forced the Clintons to reallocate their political capital from attacking Iraq to their own survival. Ironically, back then, it was the WSWS trying to bring attention to this putsch.
Saddam’s possession of unconventional weapons was extensively confirmed by Hans Blix, in an address to the U.N. in early 2003, which included discussion of anthrax production, VX and long-range missiles to deliver them, none of which had been accounted for at the time.
Statements made by the Bush Administration were also later affirmed by the Democrat-controlled Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which repeatedly found that the information presented to Congress and the American People was “substantiated by existing intelligence“.
So, no Jeremy, the facts to which you refere were never “discredited” – at least not outside the JournOList-driven world of falsehoods and statist memes that you inhabit, designed to perpetuate the myth that Saddam wasn’t, in fact, funding international terrorism and maintaining an extensive arsenal of chemical weapons. He was. Deal with it.
The bottom line here is this: the State-promoting media insists on broadcasting divisive propaganda designed to build the illusion that there’s some “difference” between the Republican and Democrat parties at the federal level; that somehow the “liberal” / “progressive” / “left” has some sort of mandate for ‘right action’ that the so-called “conservative” / “right” does not. This is just kabuki stage setting. One group is as corrupt as the other. And until Americans begin to recognize this, and pare the entire, dysfunctional federal system back to its original, Constitutional size and scope, that system will continue to destroy the society off of which it feeds.
I’ve lost count, over the past several months, of the number of times I’ve written about how only the States can take the constitutional action required to rescue us from the out-of-control federal government that is ramming socially-suicidal policy down every American’s throat, and destroying the last, best hope of Earth in the process. Because it is now essentially immune to any and all accountability, and is self-funding as well as self-affirming, the federal government is never, ever going to fix itself. Not even by electing the “right” politicians to office in D.C. is this dynamic going to be changed.
Since I gave Bill Whittle a hard time for his earlier Firewall, I think it’s only fair that I cheer his most recent one…
And while we’re on the subject, all you non-conservative folks out there had best begin to realize that, while the federal government’s present, ostensible goal is to pursue what you folks think is best, you need to realize that once they’ve achieved total omnipotence, you’ll be first in line at the trenches with a Makarov pressed up against the back of your skull. History demonstrates this inconvenient truth over and over. Best to recognize, while there’s still time, that the federal government needs to be put in its place for everyone’s benefit… not just because constitutional conservatives have been pointing it out, like, forever.
Bill Whittle has a new Afterburner up on PJTV (also on YouTube). I’m sure it will ring a lot of folks’ bells – God knows someone should be held accountable, somehow, for the collapse we’re witnessing.
But while I’m sure I’ll get flack for it – because Bill is (almost) always ‘right’ – I have to express the opinion: I don’t think this approach is a productive one.
Yes, Citizens should vote.
But please, Bill – and I say this as an long-time admirer, fellow patriot, and an Oath Keeper – shrill admonitions like this ring more like a personal vendetta than a genuine call to patriotic action aimed at restoring the Republic. Also, these persistent “Civil” War inanities aren’t helpful, IMHO. Cheerleading the racist, nationalist ideology and the unabashed tyranny that was directly responsible for destroying State sovereignty and creating what is now an utterly corrupt, omnipotent federal government – every bit the imperialist monstrosity of Hamilton’s wet dreams, and now Obama’s personal playtoy – isn’t exactly coherent rhetoric to anyone who’s dug deeper than the U.S. History 101 propaganda we’re all indoctrinated with in high school and relentlessly beaten over the head with by popular culture all day, every day, forever, amen.
Show of hands… who here thinks ANY Congress is ever going to impeach The First Black President of the United States ™? Anybody?? Because that’s the only “ownership” of policy and wrongdoing that stands a chance of ever having any substantive impact on the critical mass of somnambulant, generationally-and-pathologically-dependent lemmings currently drowning the rest of us with their misguided votes… purchased, of course, with our redistributed wealth. And that wealth, by the way, was being redistributed long before Obama was organizing communities in Chicago, or whatever he was really doing…
Sure – make Obama veto every bill from now until January of 2017. But be realistic about what you think this is ever going to accomplish. This guy and his handlers have spent his entire career – decades – protecting him from “ownership” of anything he’s done. Think you’re going to catch up to the political network and infrastructure they’ve built in only two years? With his RINO enablers in Congress running continuous interference for him?? Really?
Obama’s ideological minions in media, academia, cyberspace, the public sector and in popular culture will only manipulate an “ownership” strategy into a distraction from the ongoing destructive effects of his socially-suicidal “progressive” policies. It will either cause them to grow more stentorian in the adulation of their Savior – whose wise, paternal benevolence is the only thing standing between “the people” and the racist wrath of the Evil Republicans – or, if the current trend continues, they’ll use it to paint him as a self-absorbed, inept, in-over-his-head, rogue ideologue who never represented authentic “progressive” values… all as battlespace prep for a more “moderate”, “competent” Democrat candidate who can then run against his record of failure in 2016, rather than being forced to run against the Republican nominee.
Meanwhile, at the slightest hint that any real federal reform might be even suggested by a new Congress, the FED is poised to manipulate rates that will bring on the inevitable popping of the stock bubble, forcing the economy “back” into recession (as if we ever saw a recovery). That, and the ongoing “public safety” fiasco posed by unconstrained “immigration” (read: invasion), and the health risks that come with it, will be blamed on the “austerity”, “extremist” and “obstructionist” policies of “the Republican-Controlled Congress”. That is a mathematical certainty based on historical precedent. Count on it. It’s the same tactic that gave us the economy-crushing 110th Congress, an exploded federal deficit, plummeting labor force participation, and this disastrous presidency.
Anyone who thinks a Republican-controlled Congress has the slightest chance of calling forth some sort of reckoning – short of impeachment and jail time – has simply wasted too much time, energy and creativity trying to “shame” shameless Democrat politicians and pundits for their shameful and even treasonous actions, when they should have been working to correct the raging ineptitude of the GOP and – more importantly – working to understand what’s really necessary to bring the out-of-control, welfare-/warfare-/entitlement-state of the present federal government, which is a creature of both political parties, back under control.
The sad reality today is that practically all of the time, money, human resources and political capital poured into trying to impact the kabuki floor show in D.C. via the electoral process is now completely wasted. The federal government is never going to “fix” itself, no matter who is sent to Congress or the White House. If the last century can’t demonstrate this, nothing can, and this reality gives us only two electoral choices at the federal level: decline and collapse via the Fast Lane or the Slow Lane. All of that effort would be far better spent on the job of organizing and demanding State action, focused on paring the federal government back down to a constitutionally-legitimate size and scope. Because while you’re off on a crusade to make Obama own “his” policies, the next collectivist despot and her successor are already being groomed for a Presidency that will be “just as strong, just as well-funded” as Obama’s was, if not moreso.
While it may sound satisfying, any efforts aimed at trying to force Obama to own any of “his” policies will ultimately serve to distract from the bigger picture and the far more crucial necessity we must focus on: dismantling the overwhelming federal power structure that the so-called “progressives” long ago co-opted, and which they have been using to destroy this nation – and the very fabric of Western Culture – since the Wilson administration.
The unfortunate fact is that the “progressive” left and their RINO enablers now exercise total control over the Leviathan, Lincolnite State that was bequeathed to us by the Republican Party of 1860. It is, apparently, the government we “deserve”, and was made manifest through Hamiltonian crony capitalism and the (former) Whigs’ statist, “American System” economic agenda of inflatable fiat currency, renewed central banking, direct federal tax on income, redistribution of wealth, nationalism, regionally unbalanced protectionist tariffs, federal patronage, “internal improvements” pork, military adventures aimed at “imperial glory” and all the other ills that are now endemic to our out-of-control, power-hungry federal government.
Conscription of all U.S. Citizens into a “national citizenry” and the subsequent federal usurpation of all civil authority through the protection racket embodied in the 14th Amendment, wage enslavement through the 16th, the dilution of State sovereignty by the 17th, the slow extraction of the People’s wealth by the Federal Reserve, “incorporation doctrine” and the array of economy-crushing labor regulations & statutory entitlements that began with the “New Deal” and continue with Obamacare, are all elements of the concentration of economic & political power and civil authority in D.C. that had its roots in the Republican Party agenda of 1860.
We can’t go back in time and compensate the more than one million Americans who were killed or horribly maimed in the war that was intentionally provoked and waged to impose and expand that agenda. But we can start working to undo the damage that has been done by it since. In the end, because those in power will never give up that power willingly, that is a process that can only be pursued – at least constitutionally – by the several, sovereign States. IMHO, that’s where all the energy percolating in this rage against Obama should be directed.
Attacking Obama personally, for doing what all despots do when given the tools, is only attacking a symptom of a much larger problem. It may sound like justice, but I can’t see how it will resolve anything in the long run, given the larger reality.
If you’re a resident of Connecticut with health care insurance provided by Anthem BCBS, you’re very likely going to see your access to health care further restricted in the near future. In fact, it’s probably already happened.
This impact was not only predicted, it was avoidable.
Some years back I looked at why comprehensive health care insurance is the primary contributing factor leading to skyrocketing health care costs, restricted access to health care (due to higher prices) and the manner in which Americans have become conditioned to blindly accept an utterly unsustainable health care funding system – a system that is the product of federal government meddling in a market where it has been granted no constitutional authority to legislate.
The primary takeaways from that effort were:
Obamacare never addressed any of this. Instead, it only made these problems worse. Now comprehensive health care insurance is seen as a statutorily mandated entitlement; it is either provided, by law, through one’s employer, purchased individually (at least, if one wishes to avoid federally-imposed fines), or funded by Taxpayers in yet another extra-constitutional program implemented for the purpose of wealth redistribution.
On Tuesday, the contract in place between Anthem BCBS of Connecticut and the Hartford HealthCare network – a consortium of numerous, formerly independent hospitals and health care facilities around CT – expired. Efforts to negotiate a new contract failed to meet an October 1 deadline. As of Tuesday, the health care facilities in the Hartford HealthCare network are no longer accepting Anthem BCBS health care insurance.
Seem ridiculous? It is.
The impact of this failure can’t be overstated, at least for the citizens of CT (and, by extension, other States where this debacle will eventually repeat). Thousands of scheduled procedures had to be cancelled with no advance notice. Thousands of Anthem members who typically use any of the Hartford HealthCare facilities are left scrambling to find other providers. Still more are now forced to navigate the largely undefined labyrinth of forms, approvals, appeals and endless hours “on hold” with Anthem’s customer service department, trying to determine whether services provided at any of these facilities will be covered and, if so, whether that coverage is considered “in-network” or “out-of-network”.
I suppose the good news is that this fiasco directly affects every State employee in deep blue CT – whose health insurance is provided statewide by Anthem BCBS. In a tasteful twist of irony, many of the employees at Hartford HealthCare itself are also insured by… Anthem. It is a bona fide debacle.
The key element here, and the reason I’m bothering to write about it at all, is that it confirms, absolutely, the mechanism I discussed back in 2009 which is most responsible for our skyrocketing health care costs, i.e., that comprehensive, “first-dollar” health care insurance has encouraged health care costs to relentlessly increase at rates multiple that of inflation because insurance companies, by nature, have no long-term incentive to keep the cost of health care down, the way consumers do when they’re paying for goods and services directly. Rather – as any middleman does – insurance companies simply pass the cost increases along to their insured membership.
But don’t take my word here. I’ll let the principals in this fiasco explain it…
Until Tuesday, neither Hartford HealthCare nor Anthem would disclose details of the negotiations, which have dragged on for months. However, late Tuesday, Anthem spokeswoman Sarah Yeager said that the main sticking point was payment increases for the first year of the new contract.
Hartford HealthCare, she said, “has received increases for the last four years that significantly exceed the rate of inflation. This is not sustainable.”
Yeager said the health network wants a 100 percent guaranteed increase, while Anthem wants a combination of guaranteed increases and dollars paid based on the network’s performance. Specifically, 70 percent of the rate increase would be guaranteed and 30 percent would be tied to the hospitals’ performance and patients’ outcomes. The guaranteed amount that Anthem is offering is still greater than the rate of inflation, Yeager said.
Got that? Even with a labor force participation rate plummeting at an unprecedented rate, and with wage growth at only a tiny fraction of the very worst of past economic recoveries, Hartford HealthCare is STILL demanding reimbursement increases outpacing inflation!
This is reminiscent of the Chicago Teachers’ Union demands for a 30% pay increase amidst some of the worst of our present non-recovery, at a time when teachers were already averaging salaries well above the median income of Chicago’s families.
The so-called “progressives” are fond of blaming “greedy insurance companies” for the health care “crisis”. But in fact – as anyone even tangentially associated with the health care field knows – it is the relentless demands from hospital administrators, bureaucrats, practitioners, nurses (and their unions) and others who are driving this skyrocketing effect. And, of course, $250,000 to $500,000 starting compensation packages for some medical specialties isn’t helping this situation to improve.
Up until recently, companies like Anthem had little or no reason to push back on these demands for incremental increases – as Anthem’s spokesperson makes clear – since the increases could just be dumped on a customer who either paid the difference or went without health care insurance.
However, with the federal government literally re-writing the insurance coverage mandates on an almost monthly basis, which totally de-stabilizes the business model for any health care insurer, that is no longer a luxury. Insurance companies are already being forced to pass along rate increases to their customers that are doubling and even tripling the cost of insurance. Being ALSO forced into yet another schedule of reimbursement increases which, quote, “significantly exceed the rate of inflation” is simply not going to fly.
Due to the timing, this Anthem / Hartford HealthCare relationship may be just the canary in the coal mine.
UPDATE: Pressure from the Governor, Senators, Attorney General and State Representatives (CT’s State employees are all covered through Anthem) pushed these two to “hammer out” their differences in pretty short order, once the facts were revealed to the general public.
The Courant doesn’t say whether HHC got everything they were demanding, but the thesis I’ve outlined above is further confirmed by the following statement that was supposedly issued by HHC to its patients back on 9/11, which wasn’t included in the earlier coverage:
In a notice mailed to patients on Sept. 11, Hartford HealthCare wrote, “All we are asking from Anthem is for them to pay us in line with what other insurance companies pay us. Fair payments allow us to provide high quality, high-value health care to our communities.”
What’s “fair” – to HHC, at any rate – is whatever rate increase they’re able to extort from the “other” insurance companies, regardless of its relationship to the rate of inflation and regardless of its impact on comprehensive health care insurance premiums paid by the consumer.
Via email, past commenter HonestJon writes:
…if you wouldn’t mind, and have the time, would you mind directing me to whichever blog post of yours that deals with the HOW of changing the system back to where it needs to be? I don’t mean Constitutional conventions, legislative actions, and suchlike; I mean the HOW…
This would be the Question of the Hour, would it not? I can only provide my suggestion, based on decades of observation and a year of intense historical research into how we got to where we are. That suggestion follows below.
In the same batch of email, I received this week’s copy of “Bernie Buzz” – Senator Bernie Sanders’ shout-out to those on his mailing list, to which I subscribe in order to keep a finger on the pulse of the most radical, far-left political thought currently active in DC. That missive contained a link to a recent HuffPo piece by Robert Reich with an interesting title: “The Disease of American Democracy”. Reich cites a recently released research paper which discusses how and why the American electorate feels effectively disenfranchised today, i.e., that their vote no longer means anything because the federal government no longer concerns itself with the issues they consider important.
Sanders’ and Reich’s one-note lament is forgivable, to an extent: when all you have is a hammer-and-sickle, every problem looks like free market capitalism. But if we peek under their morally adolescent, knee-jerk refrain and look at the underlying problem that motivates Sanders’ and Reich’s discontent, one can almost smell the harmonic convergence.
Reich, like all dutiful 21st Century socialists, mindlessly (and, I’ll add, inaccurately) obsesses over the Reagan Administration as the event that triggered monied interests’ monopoly on influence over the federal government.
He’s only about a century off.
In fact, the process of centralizing all civil authority in DC actually began in 1865 and – with the help of “judicial review”, the extra-constitutional means by which the federal government maintains sole authority over the limits of the federal government’s authority – that process has continued, unabated, ever since. That hyper-centralization of authority – the inexorable, extra-constitutional transfer of civil authority from the sovereign States to an omnipotent, federal Leviathan – renders manipulation of the entire country a relatively trivial exercise because, today, there’s only one lever to pull.
So, as it turns out, fixing the problem Reich claims to want to fix requires a deceptively simple solution. That same solution is the bedrock of TEA Party, constitutional conservative and classical liberal principles: neutralizing the power inherent in wielding that single lever.
My suggestion for Jon, which I dropped in the comment thread as a response to Reich’s call-to-arms, is below:
Monied interests get their way because the federal government has almost total control over civil governance across the entire US – and those monied interests wield almost total control over the federal government.
Control over 330M people becomes a trivial exercise because monied interests need concern themselves with only one single, centralized lever of power.
This is not how a Republic is supposed to function.
This is a non-partisan phenomenon. Citizens in every State and at ALL POINTS on the political “spectrum” feel equally disenfranchised today by our out-of-control federal government, i.e., their vote means nothing.
The “left” rails against “Citizens United” and “Hobby Lobby” while the “right” denounces open borders and “Kelo”. Clearly, the federal government is serving only one master: itself. As a body, the three “branches” of the federal government have become one monolithic mechanism focused on usurpation of power: the federal government has effectively seized sole authority over the limits of the federal government’s authority. Accountability at the federal level is nonexistent, and its function is now subject to the manipulation of whatever entity can bring the most financial influence to bear.
The solution is not to try to force the federal government to fix itself by electing the “right” politicians. A century-and-a-half of federal overreach, corruption, disintegration, misfeasance, waste, fraud and deceit – and a partisan pendulum that swings first toward one side, then the other, keeping the electorate hypnotized, divided and battling among themselves – has demonstrated that this “fix” will never, ever happen given the status quo in D.C.
Yes, Americans need to “become organized and mobilized”. They need to do this with the goal of getting the federal government back under control so that it stops doing the things it was never intended to do and starts doing the things it’s supposed to do but doesn’t. Yes, a “countervailing power” is required. But the citizenry, alone, will never coalesce into a “countervailing power” capable of reining in the virtually omnipotent state the federal government has become. That is a formidable, if not impossible task.
In short: the federal government needs a re-boot.
The only constitutional way to do this is for the States to take back control over civil governance, systematically strip the federal government back to the size and scope specified in the Constitution, and allow de-centralized civil authority – distributed across the States – to do what it was originally intended to do: provide the physical manifestation of a Free Marketplace of Ideas where the Citizens – not monied interests controlling D.C. – get to pick the winners and losers in the competition for the best form(s) of social organization.
Methinks the conventional wisdom regarding the new, Obama-era definition of “Recovery” needs an update…
h/t: ZH
Unless one is already emotionally committed to the nuclear (i.e., gallows) option, IMHO an honest man’s objective assessment of the facts will reach the following unavoidable conclusions:
First, and most crucially: nowhere in our Constitution is the judiciary given ANY legislative power. Period.
Per Article I, Sec. 1, which clearly specifies that “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress“, the courts are granted exactly NO power to repeal a law, to “interpret” a law beyond its formal expression (e.g., a FEE is not a “tax”; a PENALTY is not a “tax”), to rewrite a law or to find “derived” rights (e.g., the so-called “right” to abortion) that are not expressly specified in the Constitution or any Amendment. As such, nowhere is the judiciary granted the authority to “interpret” and render judgements on the Constitution itself. Since all Article III entities are subordinate to that instrument, Constitutional questions are – by definition – outside their jurisdiction. Therefore, constitutional questions of legislation must be dealt with by Congress or, when they cannot resolve them, by the States, themselves, either together, through Amendment, or separately, through nullification.
Virtually all other federal excess proceeds from this fundamental usurpation of authority, in precisely the manner that Jefferson predicted it would, per the doctrine of boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem, which is essentially the doctrine of our federal government.
Next, whether or not one is willing to objectively examine the emerging facts which demonstrate Lincoln’s executive abuse – as they are slowly dug out from beneath the self-affirming layers of 150 years of “history” written by the victors – two glaring realities of the “Civil” War can no longer be dismissed as “revisionism” (as if revision, per se, isn’t a duty of historians whenever “accepted history” is rendered unsupportable by new information).
The first of these undeniable realities is that the “Civil” War was NOT waged to “free the slaves”, nor was it waged to “save the union”. Pat Buchanan’s detailed assessment, linked here, outlines this reality in detail.
The second reality is the fundamental transformation this country experienced as a consequence of federal usurpation beginning in 1860 and proceeding through 1940, which saw a complete inversion of civil authority from that originally established in 1788: placing the federal government at the top of a new hierarchy that rendered it utterly immune to any substantive form of accountability. The “union” that was saved by Lincoln – as Buchanan accurately observes – was nothing more than a collection of conscripted provinces, subordinated to the will of elitists in DC through the lingering threat of military force. Thereafter this nation was a Republic-in-name-only.
Since that time, the illusion of two-party democracy has been maintained by a third – may as well call it The Beltway Party – and leveraged to slowly transfer power over ALL civil affairs from the People and the States to the federal government, which now regulates, taxes, “engineers” and lectures on virtually every facet of every citizen’s life. No grand “conspiracy” was required to maintain this illusion. Rather, this is how government adapts, in Darwinian fashion, to achieve its very natural inclination that was well-known to all the Founders: relentless hunger for expansion of authority.
The final unavoidable conclusion is this: the federal government is not going to fix itself, no matter who is elected to “serve” there. And furthermore – per the original sentiment that began this thread – hanging the criminals who PRESENTLY happen to be occupying the halls of that corrupted institution won’t accomplish that either. The next batch, who will have carefully studied the mistakes of their predecessors, will simply pick up the baton and transform it once again into a scepter.
The institution itself – the entire federal government infrastructure – must be dismantled and rebuilt in the image originally envisioned by the Founders; it must be kept subordinate to the States, and the People, prevented from re-establishing footholds of usurpation over civil affairs, and forced to pursue ONLY the limited function it was not only designed to perform, but – as we have now seen following 200 years of relentless expansion – the only function that it can effectively perform. That function is the management and administration of those affairs and needs the States have in common, and the adjudication of issues arising between them.
As the past century of US history has demonstrated, federal usurpation of authority beyond these limited purposes has choked the entrepreneurial spirit and activity that led to American Exceptionalism – despite, rather than because of, federal overreach; that usurpation has cannibalized the wealth-generating capacity of capital enterprise in order to feed the pathological and generational dependence demanded by the parasitical welfare state; and worst of all, that usurpation has now threatened the security of every citizen in this nation by throwing open our borders to every thug, every terrorist, every virus and every third world beggar on the planet.
Civil governance in a true Republic – that is, governance that impacts individual citizens’ liberties, directly – can never rise above the State level. The reason for this is simple: a one-size-fits-all system of top-to-bottom social organization can never be adequate to the needs of a people as ethnically, regionally, geographically, racially, intellectually and ideologically diverse as the U.S. No gang of Central Planners, whether elected or appointed, can ever be smart enough or prescient enough or “expert” enough to design a system that can adequately addresses the needs of a nation such as ours. We are watching the reality of this inconvenient truth unfold before our eyes: without the PLURIBUS, the UNUM collapses.
Only the varied, distributed, de-centralized laboratory of several, individual, sovereign States can provide the substrate necessary to continually test, measure, re-test and choose – through genuine competition – the forms of social organization that best lead to prosperity, security, health, happiness, civil order and peace. The Free Marketplace of Ideas was not intended for words alone.
For all these reasons, authority over civil governance must be re-established as a function determined through the preservation of State sovereignty. Only the legislatures of the several sovereign States can accomplish that. And only by breaking out of our federally-programmed mindset – which focuses virtually ALL public attention on “fixing” the one entity that can never be corrected through “reform” – can that process begin in earnest.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
I don’t write much here about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. It’s just too frustrating trying to address the sheer, overwhelming magnitude of disinformation, propaganda, misdirection and endless river of bile that issues from the mouths of “Palestinian” advocates and activists who support muslim terrorists like Hamas. It becomes clearer with each passing year that 9/11 taught this country absolutely nothing.
The recent “outrage” over casualties in Gaza has prompted some responses in various forums, however. Those specifically include discussion of Jon Voight’s recent courageous admonition in response to Javier Bardem’s and Penelope Cruz’ choice to (ab)use their substantial celebrity by signing on to an open letter that includes inflammatory and baseless accusations of Israeli “genocide” committed against those who elected the terrorist Hamas regime in Gaza. As Voight was hysterically excoriated by the advocates for Hamas terrorism, both Bardem and Cruz responded to his admonition by issuing backpedaling “clarifications” of their position regarding Israel.
So it goes.
This affair calls forth memories of every past similar incident – where muslim terrorist factions relentlessly attack Israel through suicide bombing campaigns, rocket barrages, and the like, desperately trying to provoke an armed response from Israel in self-defense. Of course the international community actively ignores all this provocation… right up to the point where Israel is forced to act. Then, of course, Israel is the “aggressor” and the illegal “occupier” who is guilty of “disproportionate response”… as if there’s some unwritten rule somewhere mandating a “proportionate” response to terrorism, or any other act of war, for that matter.
The insanity inherent in this double standard would be comedy gold if it didn’t involve such a tragic, avoidable loss of human life. Then, of course, we know that the muslim terrorists have no regard whatsoever for human life, which is why they wrap their rocket launchers and weapons caches in civilians, just as they wrap their civilians with explosives, in pursuit of their (truly) genocidal war against the Jews.
One particularly clueless rant I found in this ongoing pseudo-debate was this one, which presented an historical “perspective” so at odds with documented, objective reality that it required a response, which follows below.
This whining, self-righteous, juvenile screed is laughably cherry-picked, thoroughly distorted nonsense. Was this “Cliff Notes” slop copied and pasted from the never-quite-published Volume II of Chris Harman’s “People’s History of the World”? One has to wonder.
To begin, the stipulation you cherry-picked from Balfour was a constraint on BRITISH action, i.e., the British promised not to take any action that would violate anyone’s rights. It did not specify what those “rights” were, nor did it specify ANY boundaries in Palestine with respect to the proposed offer. Those boundaries were debated and determined later. Specifically, no “land rights”, per se, were ever acknowledged or granted to anyone by this Declaration, in Palestine or anywhere else.
Beyond this, detailed information on the list of proceedings, commissions and events that followed can be found by anyone interested in the facts…
In your risibly cherry-picked version of events, you of course conveniently skipped over The San Remo Conference (1920), which established the LEGAL foundation – per International Law – of Britain’s responsibility and authority over the Palestine region, with respect to implementing the establishment of the national Jewish homeland. The constraint on Britain’s actions regarding the rights of indigenous and non-Jewish inhabitants was reiterated as part of the resolution of this conference. Again, the detailed nature of those “rights” was never specified. The only mention of land ownership was a reference to “…the territory of Palestine, which formerly belonged to the Turkish Empire…” (i.e., not the indigenous Arab population). It is clear from the text of the Mandate’s Article 6 that the land managed under the Mandate was viewed as property of the British Empire, i.e., the reference to “… close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.”
The next event you chose to ignore was the League of Nations’ formal adoption of the British Mandate for Palestine (1922) – the proceeding to which Voight refers, whose debate and resolution spanned the years from 1920 through most of 1922. Initially, the entire territory subject to the Mandate was to be designated for the establishment of the national Jewish homeland. That included ALL of the territory presently known as Israel, ALL of the presently “disputed” territories and ALL of the territory known today as Jordan. Every bit of this was initially envisioned as the territory to be allocated for the purpose of a Jewish State.
After two months of discussion on this, during which it became obvious that the indigenous displacement would be unworkable, the LoN decided in September of 1922 that ONLY the land WEST of the Jordan, to the sea would be designated for the establishment of the national Jewish homeland, and that the land EAST of the Jordan – a much larger land mass – would be placed under the governance of the Hashemite Arabs (this area east of the river is now essentially present-day Jordan). This reduced the size of the territory designated for Jewish settlement to one-fourth of the original area.
The next proceeding on this issue – which you ALSO conveniently skipped over – was The Shaw Commission and its findings. That commission was an emergency investigation to Arab rioting in response to Britain’s implementation of the Mandate. Its findings stated that the rioting was caused by, quote, “…racial animosity on the part of the Arabs…”, and concluded that the animosity was caused BY BRITAIN, due to ambiguous guarantees provided to the indigenous Arab population. Because of Arab demands and Arab rioting, thanks to British incompetence, the immigration of Jews to the region was halted by Britain, so that “further study” could be done to determine Britain’s next move.
This was Britain’s FIRST betrayal in the decades-long abandonment of the commitment they – and the rest of the international community – had made to the Jews.
You also sloppily ignored the British “study” that followed: The Hope-Simpson Enquiry and Report (1929-30). Basically, THIS was the sort of study Britain should have done before ever committing to facilitate the immigration to and settlement of Jews in Palestine. The conclusion of this report was to further limit immigration and settlement of Jews in the region.
This was Britain’s SECOND betrayal in the decades-long abandonment of the commitment they – and the rest of the international community – had made to the Jews.
The one proceeding you managed to acknowledge – The Peel Commission – ultimately proposed a plan that was never implemented.
Intellectual dishonesty forces you to obsess over this one non-event for the obvious reason that this particular commission defined boundaries for Jewish settlment that were only a tiny fraction of the territory originally designated in the original British Mandate for Palestine.
To reiterate, The Peel Commission recommendation was never implemented, as it was deemed unworkable, but it comprised Britain’s THIRD betrayal in the decades-long abandonment of the commitment they – and the rest of the international community – had made to the Jews.
Next on the list of events you conveniently ignored is The St. James Conference (1939), a total failure of British foreign policy “diplomacy” which attempted to bring Arabs and Jews together to agree on a peaceful solution to the problems BRITAIN had created in its series of incompetent decisions and actions. The British failed, utterly, to even get the Arab delegation to recognize their Jewish counterparts. As a result, no negotiation occurred, and the British came to the arbitrary conclusion that, over the following five-year period, only 75,000 Jews would be “allowed” to immigrate to the region originally designated – by them – as their national homeland.
This was Britain’s FOURTH betrayal in the decades-long abandonment of the commitment they – and the rest of the international community – had made to the Jews.
Ultimately, after several more instances involving British abandonment of its responsibilities and commitments, we come to the final action you conveniently ignored – which guaranteed permanent, bloody conflict in the region – taken by the international community itself, in the body of the United Nations. The conventional “wisdom” (read: common ignorance) of these issues usually begins at this point in history, ignoring virtually everything that came before. This is roughly like trying to understand U.S. history by ignoring everything that occurred before 1868.
The adoption of Resolution 181 (1947) signaled both Britain’s and the U.N.’s total and complete abandonment of the commitments made to BOTH the Arabs and the Jews over the preceding three decades, during which they lured tens of thousands of Jews to the region under false assurances, while making similar false guarantees to the indigenous Arab population. That resolution, which embodied a “compromise” partition plan, which EVERYONE knew had no chance of resolving the region’s many issues, immediately transformed the ongoing conflict into an open civil war between the Arab and Jewish factions. The Resolution was, of course, never implemented.
The result of this incompetence was the 1947-48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine, which morphed into the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (the first of several) when the Arab League joined the conflict, attacking the Jewish settled territories from all sides and ending with establishment of the victorious Jewish State of Israel.
Resolution 181 was the FINAL betrayal in the decades-long abandonment of the commitment that the British and the rest of the international community had made to the Jews. That Resolution, and the decades of betrayal it symbolizes, is the root cause of the violence that continues to this day, which is not a result of “Zionism” or “occupied territories” or any of the other academic and anti-semitic propaganda commonly cited in this context.
The ongoing demonization of the IDF, Israel, “Zionism” and every other aspect associated with the Jewish immigration to Palestine – including, most recently, the hysterical and inflammatory accusations of “genocide” – is nothing more than an ongoing effort to misdirect and camouflage the real source of the conflict in the Middle East: British arrogance and U.N. incompetence.
Anyone who wants to understand the reason for the loss of life in Gaza need look no further than the arrogance and incompetence of Britain and the United Nations, which have promoted and exacerbated the ethnic conflict in Palestine at every turn, over the course of almost a century. Their monumental acts of misfeasance have created an insoluble Gordian Knot in the Middle East that can now only be resolved by the elimination of one faction or the other, as the two can not and will never coexist in peace: Israel will not simply capitulate, and the Islamic world can not tolerate Israel’s existence.
The civilian casualties in Gaza are just the latest in a long string of tragedies, part of the long-running crime against humanity for which neither Britain nor the U.N. has ever been held accountable.
Diana West adds one more example to a long list of reasons why American “Thinker” disappeared from my blogroll and daily surfing schedule long ago. That site remains – as so many others – a bastion of inaction that is autistically obsessed with trying to “shame” the shameless into doing the right thing, while preserving the conventional “wisdom” upon which most Americans’ myopic contemporary historical perspective is based. Not for the pompously, politically correct: any challenge to the various forces of the Leviathan State which benefit from our “peer-reviewed”, national(ist) catechism.
Diana has been under attack by several purported “conservatives” (Red Diaper Babies all, IIRC) for revealing the extent to which communist influence directed US federal policy during the era surrounding FDR’s fateful administration. Recently these attacks were discussed in an article at American Thinker. When Diana submitted her response… well… she tells the story fairly succinctly:
After crafting a defense against just a few points of attack extracted from the massive Lipkes critique, I sent it in as my response. American Thinker rejected it unless — get this — I agreed to accept the editorial guidance of American Thinker in rewriting my own defense of my own book. This becomes extra-jaw-dropping since the editor presuming to direct my own defense of my own book had also declared himself hostile to it.
Jaw-dropping indeed. And yes, Lipkes’ critique is indeed massive – a point not lost on this writer, who submitted an article based on this post to AT years ago, and was repeatedly told it had to be trimmed, trimmed, and trimmed again… to the point where not enough content could be included to actually make the case.
The exchange that followed is as telling as it is dismaying, and provides one more glimpse into the closed, self-righteous mindset that no doubt drives the editorial process ruling over every academic textbook purporting to tell the history of the United States. This bit from AT “editor” JR Dunn jumped out, in particular:
But the major problem is this – Jeff Lipkes is right.
I am a military historian, with some familiarity with the WW II European campaigns. With only minor caveats, I agree with Lipkes’ analysis as opposed to that in America Betrayed [SIC].
So, not only has this self-described “editor” paid so little attention to detail that he can’t even get the title of Diana’s book correct, he has decided that an Appeal to Authority fallacy is sufficient basis upon which to stymie any balanced discussion of the topic because – in his expert opinion – Lipkes is “right” (and, by extension, Diana is therefore full of beans). The debate is over. The history is settled. You can “defend” yourself against your detractors’ slings and errors, but you’ll only be allowed to use the tools we provide (i.e., none).
I recently experienced the sort of response Diana reports on this case, albeit on a far less visible level, involving a related but different topic. That experience is related here. Clearly, there are a wide range of factions with vested interests in maintaining our country’s distorted view of the past – even among those who incessantly whine about how we’re headed for collapse while doing nothing practical to avert it. And they’re not necessarily all on the “progressive” side of the discussion.
Gerard Van der Leun excerpted a post from The Z Blog (America’s Colonial Class) which prompted a rather lengthy comment from yours truly.
Apparently, something in that comment inspired Gerard to promote it to a full-blown blog post (complete with cool graphics), and the array of responses would indicate that a nerve was struck. The excerpt, the original comment, and a follow-up I’ve posted to the promoted copy, are posted below… just… ‘cuz.
The Red Team keeps chanting about how the solution to immigration begins with securing the border. That’s self-delusion. We face the dilemma colonized people have always faced. The solution begins with buying the wood for the gallows to be built on the Mall in Washington. It’s only then that we have truly faced up to what we have to do to fix our country.
Sorry, but I’m finding that I can no longer abide this fantastical, “Hang ‘Em High” bluster.
First, an untouchable oligarchy wielding the full might and technology of the most powerful military machine ever conceived by Man simply chuckles at such empty threats, assuming such threats are acknowledged at all.
Second, and more importantly, any viable – constitutional – solution to the dilemma we face can only begin once we understand who the “pod people” really are, what made them the way they are (or, more accurately, what has permitted them to remain the way they are), and what has facilitated their ascendancy over virtually all of society. Action taken without that understanding is not a search for a solution, it’s a quest for payback. A Reign of “justice – prompt, severe, inflexible” smacks of Revenge, not of Reckoning, and – at least in my very frustrated opinion – will only reinforce, rather than obviate, the root cause of the cyclic flow of history that our society is now poised to repeat.
What frustrates me, personally, is that anyone who looks back at their own transformation – from marxist/leftist/self-righteous/anarchist/activist into a fully-realized adult with a sense of individual responsibility and moral maturity compatible with Enlightenment values – ought to see a Truth that uniquely positions them to begin that understanding (yes, Bill Whittle… and neo-neocon… and Gagdad Bob… and Gerard… and so many others… I’m looking at you as well as myself). Maybe that requires some outside-the-box thinking; maybe it requires a Red Pill and rescue from The Matrix; I don’t know. But somehow, there must be some way to ignite the intellectual, spritual and emotional wherewhithal required to examine this question.
There’s a Catch-22 built into human social development that is observed in the parabolic trajectory of every past fallen society – from the Sumerians to the Mayans to the Athenians to the Romans to the Bourbons to the Ottomans to the Britons to the Russians. Unless we figure out the secret to this Catch-22, which our forebears clearly did not, we will soon be joining them on the ash heap of their remains; and that heap includes the gang who thought the solution to their dilemma began with buying the wood for guillotines.
IMHO, the Founders understood a great deal about this Catch-22 and did everything they could manage – given the milieu in which they acted – to neutralize and overcome it. Their great success was not just the institutionalization of individual liberty, but the insitutionalization of a Republican Form of Government based on individual sovereignty and specific, limited delegation of authority, which inverted the social order as compared to every society that had preceded them. Few people are aware of – much less understand the magnitude of the paradigm shift inherent in – that inflection point today.
Yet somehow, contrary to every sentiment that motivated the creation and ratification of the Constitution, today we find ourselves in a society where the individual is all but completely subordinated to a relentlessly-expanding federal government. The paradigm shift has been undone in practically every way that matters. Not only that, the levers of power in that government are in the sweaty, incompetent grip of “pod people” who are utterly oblivious to the socially suicidal implications of the policies they demand.
Clearly, something – many things, in fact – went very wrong on the road from 1788 Philadelphia, which saw perhaps the greatest advance in human liberty ever to occur, to our southern border of 2014, which has recently seen one of the greatest crimes committed against the Constitution and the People of the U.S. – by their own government – in all of our history.
The solution to our dilemma begins not with buying wood, but by identifying, acknowledging and understanding those things that went so wrong in this nation’s past. The solution requires a thorough understanding of how these missteps led to the fundamental transformation of a Republic, comprised of sovereign States, to a de facto empire, ruled by a permanent oligarchy – presently comprised of “pod people” – who maintain control through the illusion of two-party “democracy” as a carrot and the lingering threat of military force as a stick. The solution requires repair, not reprisal, using the Constitution as a basis and its ratification as a guide.
If we are a nation of laws, not men, then the solution to our present dilemma must be sought in the reformation of those laws, not the hanging of men.
I’m not suggesting that this process won’t require the use of force at some stage. But I submit that any notion involving the use of force that does NOT have popular support and a coherent plan based on, and inspired by, the values expressed in our Constitution, is little more than a silly pipe dream.
Woah. This was a surprising find this afternoon…
The variety of responses is encouraging. Well, most of them. An assertion like “you are very naive” (which appears in the other thread), without any rationale to support it, renders such a reply little more than ad hominem and, thus, doesn’t leave much room for discussion, or room for much of a reply other than “eh… no, I’m not naive at all”.
It seems obvious that the pressing question posed by the growing crisis of the day is: What Is To Be Done?
Clearly, some (a few? many? most?) folks want to examine this question in the context of retribution, i.e, against those who are (most recently) responsible for the transgressions we see as destructive of our liberty. This context – e.g., (metaphorical?) references to constructing gallows on the National Mall – offers little in the way of examining how the transgressors came to wield such destructive power in the first place, or how future transgressors will be deterred. I’ve personally come to see this approach as short-sighted, at best, and potentially disastrous, at worst, and have tried to explain why. I have to assume that the explanation provided significant motivation for Gerard to promote the comment to a blog post but, FWIW, I didn’t detect much acknowledgment or discussion of that explanation in the responses above.
I prefer to examine this question based on one critical, underlying premise: that the question is an existential one. I therefore choose to examine this question within boundaries that are as objective, rational & moral as my limited faculties can define.
Contrary to the apparent assumptions expressed in some of the responses here (and elsewhere), I’m also a realist. I recognize the glaring lack of objectivity, reason and morality which defines the forces responsible for this crisis, and entertain no illusions that those forces will be brought to heel solely by reformation of our laws (as others who would restore the Republic and the primacy of the Constitution seem to do). As a realist I’ve also grudgingly begun to acknowledge that very few in our society fully recognize who or what these forces are and, more importantly, how and why those forces have once again come to threaten the liberty, prosperity, happiness, peace and civil order of what, by rights, ought to be a society capable of flourishing indefinitely.
In fact, rather than conducting a thorough examination of the crisis’ root causes, it seems that a disturbing number of Americans prefer a retreat to the relative familiarity of the tribe, and the pursuit of various forms of battle: verbal, legal, political, rhetorical and, soon – apparently – physical, armed conflict. Despite the clinical evidence that recognizes this inclination toward tribal identity, I personally find the lack of imagination and lack of humanity inherent in that approach to be… distressing.
The paradigm shift I referred to yesterday, to my mind, is the essential element required to examine the question of What Is To Be Done. That shift is completely overlooked in much of the various commentary purporting to address this question. Acknowledgment of that shift’s monumental significance is an arguably rational basis upon which to reject much of the fatalistic commentary lately offered in consideration of What Is To Be Done and which, among other recommendations, engenders this fantastical, “Hang ‘Em High” bluster.
In that context, just as one example, we see the US as it currently stands being compared to a “banana republic”. This criticism is certainly fair enough as far as it goes. That is, there are certainly some aspects of the present condition that validate this comparison. But those limited aspects are a far, far cry from encompassing the whole of our governing structure, much less the whole of our society. As a basis upon which to formulate any objective, rational, moral plan to restore the Republic – especially as it references past societies and cultures whose history, ethnicity, character and form of government are wildly different from ours – this comparison is just too simplistic.
Similarly, the fatalistic commentary mentioned above appears to rely on an apples-to-asteroids comparison. Reference to the Tytler historical cycle, and (IMHO, defeatist) surrender to the notion that we are doomed to repeat the cyclic rise-and-fall of past civilizations and societies necessarily discounts the potential that is inherent in the paradigm shift that occurred in this nation in 1788. That shift, for the first time in human history, signaled an opportunity to break that cyclic crash into a dark age every so-and-so-many years or generations. While that shift certainly did not change human nature, it provided a radically new framework that was specifically designed – at least as far as it went – to more comprehensively accomodate that nature. The effort was imperfect, since the humans that crafted it were imperfect. But despite that imperfection – and, I would submit, despite the ongoing effort to corrupt it that began during its first years of life, and which has continued from that day to this – the shift embodied in that effort produced the most exceptional example of human society to date.
So… what produced this exceptional example? Was it a change in human nature? As noted above, I think anyone would agree that this new form of governance didn’t achieve that – didn’t even set out to do that, in fact. What it sought, and largely achieved, was a way to leverage human nature as it was.
So what is it that makes anyone think the dilemma we face can be addressed by punishing men for what is clearly in their nature to do? Surely, those who are (even justly) punished will simply be followed by more such men, who think they’re more clever than the ones hanging from the gallows. That is… unless a reformation of the laws renders such efforts more difficult.
Howard Nelson mentioned Mark Levin’s _The Liberty Amendments_. FWIW, I agree that this work is a valuable place to get educated. That said, I don’t think Levin’s proposed amendments would stand a snowball’s chance in you-know-where of getting to the root cause of the dilemma we face. Simply put, the federal government, entrenched as it is and immune to all forms of accountability, ignores the entirety of the Constitution at its whim NOW. Reason dictates that adding more amendments – assuming they’re similarly designed to constrain a criminal enterprise that ignores all constitutional constraints – won’t even slow, much less reverse the current trend.
It’s my opinion that the only action sufficient to this end is to explicitly declare in an Amendment that which is implicit (but universally ignored) in the Constitution and the first ten Amendments. The goal is to substantively reverse the usurpation of authority pursued by the federal government going back to Marshall’s unilateral declaration of the courts’ legislative authority in 1803, and to restore the sovereignty of the several States that existed prior to April of 1861 – and not only to restore it, but to strengthen it even more.
I’ve proposed an Amendment aimed at doing just this. It’s certainly more severe than any of those proposed by Levin, but I don’t believe it’s any more radical than the Constitution was in its day. Rather than relying primarily on the “separation of powers” doctrine, which has utterly failed to preserve a legitimate federal government, it has the notable advantage and unique characteristic that it empowers the sovereign States to respond in a decisive way to federal usurpation. In short, per Friedman, and fully cognizant of the human nature responsible for the dilemma we presently face, it is a mechanism aimed at making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.
The Constitution and the first ten Amendments institutionalized individual liberty and the Republican form of Government guaranteed to each State. This proposal, cognizant of human nature, aims to institutionalize individual responsibility and the federal accountability that was missing from the Founders’ initial effort – two critical elements that have proved necessary to protect that liberty, and which democratic traditions and institutions alone have proven insufficient to provide.
Looks like it’s time once again to present the latest iteration of my modest proposal for a wholesale re-boot…
The first section of the following proposed Amendment is the sort of thing that the UK relies on to replace its (elected) government whenever a majority of the House of Commons decides it’s time. IMHO, this function – or something similar – was a glaring omission from the original Bill of Rights, and it ought to be added via Article V Convention… that is, whether the federal Congress can get its act together to begin the ratification process, or not.
This proposal seeks to accomplish the one thing Mark Levin’s Liberty Amendments all fail to do: fix the problem. (Note: I’m a huge fan of Mark’s proposed changes and, especially, the motivation and rationale he expresses in his desire to restore the Republic. Two of his proposed Amendments speak to issues mentioned below, but IMHO they simply don’t go far enough in actually restoring the Republican Form of Government guaranteed to each State. A more in-depth discussion on this point is a subject for another time.)
An Amendment to Re-Establish and to Preserve the Legitimacy of the General Government
Whereas it is hereby re-affirmed that the several sovereign States and their respective citizens are the sole grantors of authority to the general government;
Whereas it be recognized that the general government has repeatedly exceeded the constraints placed upon it by the several States, which are the sole grantors of its limited authority;
Be it resolved that, congruent with each general or so-called “mid-term” election, when 3/5ths of the several sovereign States’ legislatures shall so affirm,
– a snap general election will be held on April 19th soonest;
– EVERY federal elected office defined in Articles I & II of this document will be replaced; no re-election to office is permitted;
Upon the following July 4 inauguration of the newly elected general government, the first order of business will be,
– ALL supreme court justices will be replaced;
– ALL cabinet-level secretaries will be replaced;
Be it further resolved that, congruent with each general or so-called “mid-term” election, any and all federal departments, agencies, administrations and/or bureaus, receiving a vote of no confidence from 3/5ths of the States’ legislatures will, within the course of 180 calendar days, be eliminated, their functions terminated and their funding returned to the Treasury;
Be it further resolved that, as of the date of this Amendment’s ratification, the so-called “Fourteenth Amendment” appended to this document, which has never been ratified in accordance with constitutional requirements, is declared null and without force; as well, the Seventeenth Amendment is hereby repealed; all Senators shall be chosen by their State legislatures, in accordance with the original declaration in Article I of this document.
Be it further resolved that, as of the date of this Amendment’s ratification, per the Tenth Amendment originally appended to this document and the specific, limited constraints on State powers declared in Article I, Section 10 of this document, it is hereby re-affirmed that the Powers of nullification and secession – as well as any and all other Powers not proscribed in Article I, Section 10 of this document – shall be reserved to the several sovereign States in perpetuity, to be invoked at the discretion of their respective legislatures, pursuant to the will of the Citizens of their respective States;
Be it further resolved that, as of the date of this Amendment’s ratification, per the delegation of powers declared in Article I, Section 1 of this document, the practice of “judicial review” – that is, any legal proceeding within which the judiciary exceeds its constitutional authority, by either removing or restating legislation that has been duly passed by Congress – is declared null, void and no longer in force or enforceable; the Supreme Court of the United States and all inferior Article III courts will be henceforth constrained in their function to the original, limited authority specifically enumerated in this Constitution, which is the adjudication of cases under law duly passed by Congress and expressly not the issuance, repeal or revision of any law, Act, Treaty or other instrument falling under the authority granted in Article I, Section 1.
…and the statist shills who doggedly promote it…
Fascinating to see the Washington Examiner concerned with ‘censorship’ here in the U.S. The reason for this will require some explanation.
For a little over a year now – starting back when it first hit me that our present crisis of governance was born in the blood of over one million Americans killed or maimed in Abraham Lincoln’s devastating, illegal, unnecessary war – I’ve tried to engage Lincoln’s apologists in an objective examination of his actions (as opposed to the empty, florid prose they relentlessly mimic in an attempt to seem profound) and their parallels to Obama’s ongoing, extra-constitutional overreach, which is slowly destroying what’s left of the U.S.
The object of this effort has been to shed some light on the causes and the fallout from the fundamental transformation that the U.S. experienced during the years 1861-65. That is to say, the transformation from a free Republic of sovereign States voluntarily allied through a subordinate, general government, into a de facto empire, ruled by a permanent oligarchy in D.C., using the lingering threat of military force.
During that time I’ve discovered a veritable cottage industry and a small army of historians whom I never knew existed, all focused on promoting a wider understanding of the documented facts and inconsistencies which might reveal to Americans the true origins of our utterly corrupt, relentlessly expanding, unaccountable federal government. While I was aware of a lingering resentment and sympathy for the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy out there, I was surprised to discover the various scholarly efforts to shed light on Lincoln’s crimes against the Constitution and the American people, all of which have been systematically and vociferously attacked and demonized by an academic “consensus” that is built on nothing more than the meticulously cherry-picked history written by the victors.
This is to say nothing of the historical details I’ve been exposed to since, virtually all of which have been as forcibly airbrushed from contemporary consciuosness as have events like FDR’s criminal attempt to pack the SCOTUS bench with socialist sympathizers and Harding’s wildly successful reduction in the size and cost of the federal government, and the almost instant, positive impact of that reduction, which ended the Depression of 1920-21.
Some of these details, like Lincoln’s use of executive privilege to hide – from Congress and from the American People – orders that were explicitly aimed at provoking the war, are meticulously recorded in various, openly accessible records. Other details, such as Lincoln’s textbook racism and personal preference to ship black slaves back to Africa (see the Douglas debates), as well as his open, vocal support for the statutory protection of slavery in perpetuity (comments on the recently-approved Corwin Amendment in the First Inaugural address) are also part of the historical record. Yet thanks to the ongoing deification of Lincoln that is a function of socially-engineered worship of the leviathan state he created, these details are simply never acknowledged in polite (i.e., politically correct) company. When acknowledgement is forced, cognitive dissonance ensues, followed by parsing of words, gnashing of teeth, and the inevitable, knee-jerk retreat to “but… Slavery!! SLAVERY!!!1j1!!” or some other ends-justify-the-means, post hoc fallacy used to declare that the “debate” is over and that the “history” is settled.
Last night I read one of the most egregious misrepresentations of history I’ve seen in this context to date: an article by Mark Tapscott, of all people, demonizing President James Buchanan as, quote, “America’s first catastrophic president“. Tapscott’s view is that Buchanan “did nothing” regarding the looming crisis caused by two growing – essentially regional – conflicts. Mark’s thesis (and, truth be told, the view of most similarly-programmed American ‘citizens’) is that Buchanan, through some novel rationalization that is rooted firmly in a willful blindness to the facts, is to be blamed for the death and devastation wrought by a war his successor provoked and pursued to near-genocidal extent.
The first of these aforementioned regional conflicts was fomented by the federal government’s ongoing economic attack on the South. This attack was in many ways an eerie precursor to the economic war being waged today on productive Taxpayers – now a distinct minority in a society governed by majority / mob rule in every way that matters – in pursuit of funding for the leviathan state. That attack was pursued on behalf of northern industrialists, railroad barons, textile magnates, banksters, insurance firms and various other New England and Whig factions, whose platform (which ultimately became Lincoln’s “Republican” platform) supported federally-funded “internal improvements” (pork/graft/cronyism), fiat currency (similarly aimed at creating money out of thin air to fund crony enterprise), central banking and most of the other varied, extra-constitutional socio-economic elements – such as the tax on individual incomes and the notion of “national” citizenship – that emerged following Lincoln’s seminal act of usurpation, i.e., granting himself authority to provoke and pursue war on American citizens. [The platform described here, and the various excesses institutionalized as a result of its successful implementation once State sovereignty was eliminated as a potential barrier, is the basis of the relentless growth of the federal government and its virtually unconstrained, ongoing usurpation of authority seen since 1865.]
This economic attack on the South took the form of a devastating tariff. Of particular note is the fact that this tariff was designed by a Pennsylvania publishing magnate – Henry Carey – a “one-percenter” who traded his inherited publishing business for notoriety as an “economist”. Carey was a vocal opponent of free trade, and one of the first, most influential American advocates for exactly the sort of Hamiltonian, crony capitalism we see adding to the national debt and destabilizing our economy today.
The tariff bill created by Carey was proposed for passage by a Vermont congressman and the tariff, as designed, acted both as trade protection for northern manufacturing – allowing northern industries such as the burgeoning steel industry to deflect competition and keep prices artificially high – and also as a net generator of federal revenue earmarked for the early equivalent of bona fide corporate welfare in the North. Some 75% of this revenue would be extorted from the Southern States through a tax on imports that increased the cost of imported goods, ultimately, by almost 50%.
Notably, an identical attempt at similar extortion had been beaten back through the use of nullification and the threat of secession in 1832 – another event that is, by turns, either willfully misrepresented or simply airbrushed from U.S. History entirely, because it exemplifies the essence of the Founders’ Republican Form of Government, guaranteed to every State, and the manner in which it was intended to function in extremis, i.e., when extra-constitutional federal overreach, driven by special interests, threatened regional or State interests. But this effort was once again resurgent in the 1850s, culminating in passage by Congress of the onerous Morrill Tariff, and signed into law by Buchanan as he exited office. The regional nature of the conflict engendered by this law can be seen in the distribution of the House vote on this bill, which occurred prior to secession and which was almost perfectly split along regional – i.e., Northern/Southern State – not party lines.
The second source of regional conflict was driven by the controversy stemming from two directly-related issues, both of which revolved around the Constitutionally-recognized institution of slavery.
The first of these was the question of State sovereignty with respect to newly admitted States’ authority over the proscription of chattel slavery – an area that was unequivocally recognized as a State issue by the Constitution. Northern labor interests naturally opposed the spread of cheap (black / slave) labor to the new States and territories; industrialists saw the spread of slavery to the new States and territories as a potential competitive threat, if applied to industrial manufacturing – a competitive threat that could not be neutralized via tariff. And so northern sentiment was focused on leveraging its electoral advantage to force federally-mandated abolition in any new States, effectively usurping control over an institution which the Constitution clearly identified as one to be determined by the individual sovereign States.
Notable in this context is the fact that some northern States had passed immigration legislation intentionally designed to prevent or limit immigration into those States by free blacks. Also notable in this context is the subsequent well-known warfare waged against the American native indians, driven primarily by northern factions, which puts the lie to the risible myth that rank-and-file northerners had some higher, altruistic motivation for freeing slaves in the South.
The second of these slavery-related issues was the active refusal of former slaveholding States in the North to meet their lawful obligations regarding “Person[s] held to service”, outlined in Art. IV of the U.S. Constitution. Controversy repeatedly arose on this issue, in the form of opposition to the Fugitive Slave Laws which – again, notably, and somewhat ironically – led to the use of nullification as a recourse in support of State or regional interests.
The language of the U.S. Constitution regarding the institution of slavery – as ratified by every State through 1865 – is an inconvenient truth to which virtually every Lincoln apologist seems willfully blind. Today we recognize as a monumentally regrettable fact that black slavery was an integral part of civilized society for most of human history well into the 19th century. Reasonably well-informed, rational people recognize that the sea change upon which abolition rode – peacefully, in the case of every other first-world nation but the U.S. – derived from a growing scientific and corresponding social recognition that members of the black, African race were not merely a scant step up from four-legged beasts of burden, to be likewise sold as property and used for menial labor, but are in fact human beings with human rights and legal standing comparable to that of every other race. Unfortunately, this regret is a factor in the phenomenon of “white guilt” that is fomented and exploited today by race-baiting politicians, community organizers, academics and media pundits as they leverage the overreach of the federal government – again, made possible by Lincoln’s fundamental transformation of the U.S. – to pursue their statist, collectivist ends.
What is not so readily recognized is the fact that this institution was far from isolated to the United States, as is so commonly implied, especially by advocates of moronic proposals like “reparations” and even “affirmative action”. In fact, slavery flourished throughout most of Western Civilization and, as well, among the African people who spent that same history kidnapping and selling their countrymen to Dutch, British and Portuguese slave traders. These traders, in turn, brought the institution to the New World. Nevertheless, the almost universal acceptance of slavery as an institution throughout the civilized world up until the mid-1800s was a fact – one that is directly relevant to the regional conflict that grew in the U.S. during the 1850s.
That popular acceptance of slavery was expressed in the U.S. as late as March of 1861, immediately preceding the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, who in turn gave that expression – the now-virtually-unknown Corwin Amendment – his unconditional, vocal (read: politically convenient) support during his First Inaugural Address.
Historian Daniel Crofts describes the cognitive dissonance generated by acknowledgement of this expression thusly:
Above all, though, the amendment tells modern Americans something about our national history that we do not want to know. Today we look at slavery with dismay — as we should. But this often undercuts our ability to see the United States as it was. We celebrate slave runaways and relish more information about the Underground Railroad. We persuade ourselves, incorrectly, that large numbers of slaves escaped from bondage, and that many Northern whites reached out to black fugitives.
More than anything else, this conscious resistance to see the U.S. “as it was” renders most Americans utterly incapable of objectively examining the facts, events, rationale, law and conflicting social sensibilities that led to the crisis in 1860. Most Americans are completely ignorant, for instance, of the fact that there were more free blacks living in the South than in the North at the start of the “Civil” War.
With all that and more in mind, I posted the first comment in reply to Tapscott’s article at the Washington Examiner via Disqus. Tapscott’s goal, clearly stated, was to paint Obama with the same aura of ineptitude, misfeasance and dereliction Americans are relentlessly trained to heap onto Buchanan, for the unforgiveable crime of preceding a war criminal as POTUS. The irony, which I attempted to point out in my comment, is that Americans are essentially programmed to demonize Buchanan for Lincoln’s crimes and that, furthermore, Obama’s serial crimes against the Constitution and the American People are a perfect mirror of the actions pursued by Lincoln, which he consistently rationalized based on a war he provoked. Obama has acted in a similar fashion, rationalizing his overreach by never letting a crisis go to waste – especially when he, as a Senator, was an integral element in the cause of the crisis.
Even more significant, in light of the crisis we face as a result of unrestrained federal usurpation of authority, is the fact that the power Obama wields in his efforts to these ends can be traced directly back to the fundamental transformation affected by Lincoln’s usurpation of authority in 1861, which rendered State sovereignty and, with it, any practical constraint on federal overreach, essentially null and void.
Although that comment has been recorded in my Disqus history, indicating that the moderators at the W.E. acknowledged it, it does not appear under the list of comments posted in response to the article. This is the one and only time I’ve ever seen this phenomenon. Typically, if a comment is held for moderation or deleted, it doesn’t appear in the Disqus history. Unless they’ve changed something there, it’s pretty clear the folks at the W.E. aren’t interested in their readers being exposed to notions that color outside the lines of the picture the federal government has painted over the truth for 150 years.
So once again we see the power of the federal government’s decades of propaganda over rational thought in the U.S.
Note, in the above, that my comment – recorded on the Disqus servers – has been deleted without a trace from the list of comments below the W.E. article.
Since the W.E. has chosen to censor my thoughts, providing no justification whatever, I repeat them here.
“Buchanan did nothing…”
Mark… really??? This breathtaking assertion is almost criminally wrong.
Buchanan is to be demonized as a “catastrophic President” because he managed to maintain the peace? Because he chose NOT to unilaterally provoke a bloody, illegal, utterly unnecessary war that killed and/or maimed over one million Americans? Because he did NOT issue an executive order that stood in unequivocal, direct violation of the Constitution? Because he chose NOT to blatantly contradict a resolution duly passed by Congress, ratified by two States, and for which he had given his public, vocal support… when it was politically convenient to do so?? Because he chose NOT to wage war on American civilians? Because he did NOT jail Americans for the crime of opposing his statist, Whig agenda? Because he chose NOT to openly lie to Americans and misrepresent his own unprovoked acts of war and his invasion of the South as a “response” to “insurrection”? Because he did NOT unilaterally suspend the writ of habeas corpus or threaten to arrest jurists for opposing his despotic statist agenda? Because he did NOT cravenly invoke “executive privilege” to hide from the public his actions, and those of his direct subordinates, designed to provoke a war?
These “failures” are the “nothing” for which Buchanan is to be demonized?
How is this attack on Buchanan any different from the unhinged statists of the left, relentlessly blaming “Republicans” and “conservatives” for all the ills their mindless, morally adolescent collectivist fetish has caused? How is this baseless, willfully blind attempt to shame Buchanan any different from Obama, Pelosi and Reid blaming Bush for their own misfeasance, ineptitude, socially suicidal policies and divisive rhetoric?
Here we have an undeniable sign of a society and culture in the process of
irretrievable breakdown: it has devolved – crushed under the weight of 15 decades of propaganda and “history written by the victors” (i.e., the federal government, its useful idiots and statist ideologues) – to a level where even the people WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER promote the ridiculous claim that Buchanan did “nothing”… simply to rationalize his successor’s serial crimes against the Constitution and the American People.
Neither Buchanan nor Lincoln swore any oath to “free the slaves”. Neither swore any oath to “save the union”. No, the sacred oath that both Buchanan and Lincoln swore was to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.
Buchanan lived up to that oath AND also somehow managed to preserve both the peace AND the Union… right up until Lincoln’s election forced the South to exercise Tenth Amendment powers and separate themselves – just as their fathers and grandfathers had been forced to separate themselves – from a region and a government which openly sought to economically decimate them.
Lincoln, for his part, ignored that oath almost from the day he was inaugurated, hiding behind the florid prose his idolators mindlessly quote today without ever once objectively examining his serial, criminal actions, much less their destructive impact on the Republic.
So, Lincoln is deified for causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and all but destroying the concept of State sovereignty which had kept the overreach of our now-out-of-control federal government nominally in check. Meanwhile, Buchanan is openly demonized for his inability, apparently, to persuade and/or force the South to commit economic suicide. This is all the evidence any objective observer needs to see how this nation has lost all sense of itself, and why it will likely never recover.
…for which there is yet no corresponding immovable object:
h/t Doug Ross, via Vanderleun
Easily the next best thing to re-booting the entire federal government from the ground up (although I still contend that’s the only sure-fire, long-term solution). Pass it along.
The year is 2164.
And she’s reading a high school textbook. The subject is History of the USSA Before the Great Reformation.
An entire chapter near the end is devoted to the First Black President of the United Socialist States of America: Barack Hussein Obama II. Carefully selected excerpts from his various speeches and signature legislative victories juxtaposed with beautiful images of the First Lady in her trend-setting raiment fill screen after screen. It’s easily the longest chapter in the book, and deservedly so because, as the text confirms, Obama is easily the greatest President since Lincoln. His soaring, divinely-inspired oratory and dogged, selfless devotion to social justice, income equality, defeat of global warming and the compelling urgency of his agonizing decision to place the United States under much-needed martial law in the wake of the economic chaos that came on the heels of the 2014 mid-term elections all confirm this assessment. Obama truly saved the Union, just as Lincoln did. His third and fourth terms in office went on to confirm this.
After taking several moments to vomit uncontrollably into a robotic receptable that appears out of nowhere, she wipes her mouth, passes her right hand over the barely visible object embedded in her left wrist, and punches almost violently at the word Return, floating in the holographic array of controls that appear in the air before her.
And… with a snapping sound and a dizzying, falling sensation… she’s back.
The year is 2014.
And she is visibly, physically shaken.
The protagonist of our tiny morality tale just visited the world of the future, as defined and documented by the victors of the Second Civil War – the fundamental transformation in which the USSA was born. It’s only right and proper at this point to give her some privacy… leave her to the inevitable decision: blow her own brains out? or pack a small bag, stop at an ATM, and book the next flight to Vanuatu…?
Gerard Vanderleun at American Digest has been running a weird but fascinating series of posts since President’s Day. I haven’t yet managed to figure out the purpose of these, but I get the sense he’s trying to leverage Lincoln’s rhetoric – which was often biblically inspired despite the fact that Lincoln professed no particular religious affiliation – to stir restorative attention focused on the abuse of executive authority we Americans have been subjected to of late. I’m not sure. Either way, these posts have elicited an interesting dichotomy of responses in the comments; they reveal an almost perfect bifurcation between those who worship Lincoln and those who condemn him. As you might guess if you’ve read anything else here recently, I’m in that latter camp. There don’t appear to be any fence-sitters except, perhaps, Gerard himself. When I figure out what his game is here, perhaps that will provide an indication.
As anyone who’s read my thoughts on it will know, I believe the most risible, destructive bit of propaganda built around Lincoln is the myth that he “Saved the Union”. He didn’t. He transformed the pieces of an already dissolved nation (i.e., half the country had already begun to set up shop as a new nation by the time he started his war) into an empire. In the process, he successfully destroyed the last remaining balance against federal overreach. As we watch Obama’s serial abuse of executive authority, we’re literally living the endgame of what Lincoln started back in 1861, in real time.
One interesting comment to the latest in this series was this:
And here the second greatest president of the USA* put down in writing his objective: Preserve the USA, as he swore to do. (1) Preserve and Restore the Union; (2) anything and everything else.
The obvious response to this, which someone else posted before I had the chance, was:
“Preserve the USA, as he swore to do.”
Uhm, no. He swore an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Not to preserve the union.
See the difference?
Indeed. And of course this is precisely the issue. At least for those who recognize Obama’s abuse of executive authority as the peacetime analog of Lincoln’s. Lincoln’s job was not to bend the States to his will; it was to preserve the integrity of the federal government, as subordinate to the Constitution and the States which are the sole grantors of the federal government’s very limited authority.
Another commenter went on:
no one who denigrates him has coherently articulated just exactly how the United States, or the world, would have been better if Lincoln had not preserved the Union.
This is a common refrain. It expresses the same false premise every Lincoln apologist is forced to rely upon; that is, the notion that secession was a foregone conclusion when, in fact, secession was triggered by Lincoln’s election. This is really no different from Lincoln’s own rhetoric, lamenting the actions he was “forced” to take because “the war came”… when he was the one who provoked it.
This is also no different, as it turns out, from the manner in which Obama’s policies have led to a decimated economy… a consequence of his own actions that he then cites as rationalization for his abuse of executive authority, i.e., lawmaking via the EPA, DHS, HHS, IRS and ATF, hiding evidence of federal deceit and potential crimes via “executive privilege” and attacking political opposition using the full force of the federal government.
In fact, the real question to be answered is how a split of the Union would ever have occurred if Lincoln had just been content to remain a well-paid, slick corporate lawyer for the railroads and a wandering mouthpiece for the rest of his nationalist, tariff-inflicting, Taxpayer-bilking, central-bank-promoting, fiat-currency-supporting, self-aggrandizing Whig cronies.
As luck would have it, we actually have a precedent that answers that question for us.
One of the events in history that has been airbrushed from the American consciousness – airbrushed as completely as Harding’s swift, rational, prosperity-generating response to the Depression of 1920-21 – was a case where secession had been narrowly avoided only 30 years prior. And the issue that triggered that crisis was exactly the same one brought to a head by Lincoln’s election in 1860. The difference: Jackson’s government blinked, and rolled back the onerous legislation that had caused the crisis. Hint: it had nothing to do with slavery, as slaves were still held to service in all but a minority of the States in the 1820s and 30s.
That event in 1832 has been effectively erased, along with South Carolina’s very successful Ordinance of Nullification, for two reasons.
First, it’s one of several antebellum examples demonstrating how the Founders actually intended U.S. governance to function in extremis: based on a balanced, dual sovereignty, which provided the very foundation of a Republican Form of Government, and an efficacious response to federal overreach when it became destructive of individual, sovereign State interests or their regional moral sensibilities. Other examples of this balance were exhibited by the States’ responses to the federal Alien & Sedition Acts (the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions), ordinances and resolutions effectively nullifying the federal Fugitive Slave Acts, and New England States’ responses to “Mr. Madison’s War”, as discussed at The Harford Convention.
Second, and more critically, the root cause and resolution of the crisis in 1832 reveal the lie upon which 150 years of propaganda have been built, i.e., that the South seceded because they loved “slavery” more than the Union. And, as everyone knows, based on contemporary sensibilities, slavery is an abhorrent institution so any action – including the death and maiming of over one million Americans – is justified in having ended that scourge. We’re just supposed to forget the fact that the institution was not only enshrined in the Constitution itself, but was supported (or accepted) by every State in the Union through its ratification of same upon entry into the United States. In every discussion of the “Civil” War, and of Lincoln’s abuse of executive authority, the standard reply is, “… well… SLAVERY!!!”
(Fast forward today for a moment, and you see this same basic mechanism in action whenever one of Obama’s policies is criticized. That is, instead of addressing the criticism, the critic is labeled a RAAAACIST!!, demonized as such, and the criticism itself is utterly dismissed. Of course, this is precisely why Obama was selected by the “progressive” media to champion their morally adolescent ideology in the first place: his race makes him virtually impervious to criticism. Even his black critics are denounced as “Uncle Toms”.)
In fact, what Southerners loved more than the corrupted Union of their time – which was directly, economically attacking them, while ignoring their own constitutional obligations regarding fugitive slaves – was the Republican Form of Government guaranteed by The Constitution for The United States of America. Lincoln’s “election” (i.e., less than 40% of the popular vote, driven exclusively by industrialized, densely populated northern interests), guaranteed that the federal government would leverage an electoral deck stacked against the South, to continue their pursuit of cronyism & expansion of operating revenue at the South’s expense. As the federal government made clear that it no longer felt constrained to promote the General Welfare, the South chose to exercise Tenth Amendment powers and divorce themselves from that arrangement. As they say: the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
Ultimately South Carolina, and the States which followed, seceded in 1860 for exactly the same basic reason she entertained secession in 1832: corrupt federal tariff legislation that coddled and aggrandized northern industrialists (and their enablers in the federal establishment), while at the same time decimating southern regional interests economically. When that abuse was combined with the North’s resistance in complying with their constitutional obligations regarding fugitive slaves without a clear Amendment making that resistance legal, the South was forced to make the same basic decision as the colonies had in 1776: suffer continued abuse and usurpation or strike out on their own.
But of course, Americans don’t know any of this. Today, a cherry-picked selection of Lincoln’s rhetoric is virtually tattooed on the inside of every American’s forehead, while they are instructed relentlessly, from the time they’re old enough to read, to ignore any detail or utterance that might detract from Lincoln’s national identity as The Great Emancipator. They’re raised in a world of history written by the victors of the (first) “Civil” War. They are taught to mindlessly quote Lincoln, not to examine any of his criminal actions very closely. They see the “Civil” War as one where the South were told they had to end slavery, they got pissed, took their ball and went home, started their own country on a Monday morning and, unprovoked, began shelling Fort Sumter that afternoon. In a nutshell, this is the American “understanding” of the causes leading to the “Civil” War… even as expressed by people who one would think really ought to know better.
Did Lincoln openly endorse the statutory protection of slavery in perpetuity? Yes. But ignore that. Did he knowingly violate an agreement put in place by his predecessor in order to provoke a war with the South, just to preserve the federal revenue stream they provided? Sure, but you may as well ignore that too, because… executive privilege. Did Lincoln prefer to ship all the slaves back to Africa? Don’t ask – the answer isn’t important. Did he provide a textbook example of racism and white supremacism when he asserted that blacks were an inferior race to whites? Not important. That would only upset all the poor mothers who named their children after him. Did he unilaterally suspend habeas corpus? Jail journalists? Manipulate elections? Sure. But that was all justified by, uhm… the war… he started. Shut up.
Some day Obama will be judged. If he is judged solely by his rhetoric and the “good intentions” he and his minions have deceitfully professed, he’ll go down in history exactly as the little fiction above portrays. He’ll be remembered by all sides as The Great Light Worker the media painted him as when they selected him as the next President.
However, if the criteria on which we judge this criminal and his criminal administration include his actions and the consequences of those actions – both intended and unintended, history will not be so kind.
As I look at the distorted history deifying Lincoln as a secular messiah – based solely on florid prose and oratory that is mindlessly quoted but never critically examined for any level of consistency in light of his actions and their devastating consequences – I’m not all that sanguine about this.
Cross-posted at PJM in response to Jon Bishop’s review of Yuval Levin’s The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left…
The “left/right” ideological dichotomy – at least as originally expressed in the competing ideologies and events of post-revolutionary France – is not a reliable standard of measure for *contemporary* political discourse.
In one sense, given the mechanisms by which our society is shifted ideologically over time – i.e., through election, media, academia – the traditional “left/right” concept is far too simplistic to be of any use to us, if it ever was.
In a subtler and more socially hazardous sense, however, in order to map them onto the conflicting notions and factions that drive contemporary political “debate”, we must actively distort the original meanings of “left” and “right”. Although human nature changes little over time, we in the U.S. today are dealing with a very different set of factions and social problems from those faced by the first French Assembly. Ignoring that difference, and attempting to “map” those earlier ideologies onto the conflicting views of today, using the competing philosophies of Paine and Burke (which are largely orthogonal to both), only promotes confusion and obfuscates the true nature of today’s issues.
That’s a lot of assertions. I’ll explain…
Like the labels “liberal” and “conservative”, “left” and “right” can mean wildly different things to different people at different times in history, based on a given individual’s knowledge of history and their ideological inclinations. Simply put, one can never know that one’s intention – e.g., through use of the word “left” – is accurately understood by one’s audience.
You can try this yourself: what do these labels mean to you?
Consider the label “right”. Contemporary, self-identified “conservatives” generally use this label to refer to an ideology which, at its root, favors individual liberty. Unfortunately, contemporary, self-identified “liberals” see the same label as referring to an ideology that seeks to repress their liberty. That this difference is really a function of differing definitions of “liberty” is moot, because any possibility for synergy via discourse between “liberals” and “conservatives” is obviated by this fundamental difference in the implications of the labels, themselves. This also ought to be a clue that the labels “liberal” and “conservative” are also less than useful.
Mussolini, clearly referencing the ideologies and events surrounding the first French Assembly as they applied to the events of his day, and pursuing his lifelong desire to promote socialism, recognized BOTH “left” and “right” as paths being pursued at that time to achieve socialist utopia. In his doctrine of fascism, he visciously condemned the radical, populist, revolutionary “left” and glorified the orderly, nationalist, authoritarian “right”. His thesis stressed that – of the two – the “right” was the preordained path to socialism, and he went so far as to adopt the label “fascism” – i.e., *nationalist* socialism – in order to clearly differentiate his doctrine from communism – i.e., *populist* socialism – of his day.
The critical element that observant students of history will note here is this: BOTH the “left” and the “right” forms of socialism Mussolini discussed in his doctrine led to an Omnipotent State. One was promoted through populist appeals based on “class struggle”, the other was based on nationalist appeals used to rationalize militaristic authoritarianism. The end result of both was the same: “Everything within the state (party), nothing outside the state (party), nothing against the state (party).”
Communists and socialists in the U.S. have been leveraging an etymological fallacy based on Mussolini’s doctrine (and, to an extent, the Nazis’) for decades, in an effort to distance their preferred form of social organization – socialism – from the horrific WWII crimes of the fascists, while they simultaneously airbrush from history the tens of millions murdered by various other socialist regimes (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Che, etc., etc.). That effort has since morphed into promoting overtly socialist – “left-wing” – policy as “superior” to “right-wing” “conservatism” (which is, in most ways, classical liberalism). The former is mindlessly glorified while the latter is relentlessly demonized. The labels, themselves, come to evoke a visceral, emotional response as a result, which short-circuits rational thought to a dangerous degree.
The typical claim one hears is either that (a) socialists can’t be “right-wing” or that (b) “right-wing” / conservatives are aligned with the evils and horrors of fascism because – according to the labels Mussolini himself used – fascism was a doctrine based on the “right” (John Scalzi’s rather juvenile 2008 screed entitled “Things One Should Not forget” is a wonderful example of this sort of sophistry).
See the problem yet? Words may have meaning. Labels, not so much. And labels (ab)used in ways that assume different meanings over time or in different circumstances are a big problem.
Why is this important?
The threat facing our society today is that, for well over a century, the two major competing factions at work within the federal government of the U.S. have very closely resembled the competing factions Mussolini identifies in his doctrine. That is: BOTH factions have pursued policies – as they wrestle for control based on their own interests instead of representing those of their constituents – that are leading inexorably to an undesireable endgame: an all-powerful, unaccountable, imperial federal government. The Omnipotent State.
This threat and the mechanism that drives it puts the lie to the insipid notion that political ideology can be envisioned as a “left-right” line with Communism (or populist socialism) on the far-left and Fascism (or nationalist socialism) on the far-right. Believe it or not, I had a PoliSci instructor who tried to rationalize this idiotic arrangement as a circle… go far enough in either direction from ‘democracy’ and you get to tyranny, he said. Whether linear or (ahem) circular, such a spectrum ignores the obvious fact that both Fascism and Communism are forms of social organization grounded in socialism, which of course establishes the false premise that socialism is the only workable form of human social organization.
Much worse, however, is the fact that nowhere on such an imaginary line can there be any semblance of individual liberty (to say nothing of genuine anarchy). What… the “midpoint” between two different expressions of totalitarianism is… freedom? This absurd notion is the programming in the autopilot that has controlled virtually every discussion on politics in the U.S. for the last century. And the “left/right” labels are an essential element of the ‘genetic modification’ we’ve all been subjected to, which enforces this absurdity. We must (re-)learn to think outside that box.
In reality, if all forms of social organization are to be accounted for, the only spectrum that adequately expresses the practical impact of a given political ideology is one that has The Omnipotent State – totalitarianism – at one end, and *The Nonexistent State* – anarchy – at the other. Essentially, we FLATTEN the bogus “circle” that was used by my old PoliSci instructor to artificially and nonsensically separate Fascism and Communism in one sense while at the same time equating them in another sense.
Totalitarianism and anarchy are the two TRUE extremes of human social organization. Recognizing this reality changes the “debate” considerably, focusing it on the aspects of government the Founders sought to set right in their Great Experiment, i.e., finding the right balance between the liberty of the individual and the power of the state. Furthermore, this spectrum puts both the Fascists and the Communists where they belong: at the end of the spectrum identified by a totalitarian, Omnipotent State.
The natural midpoint between THESE two endpoints is a Constitutional Republic that guarantees dual sovereignty, i.e., a balance of authority between member sovereign States and the central government, to which those States grant LIMITED authority to manage a very narrowly-constrained list of issues. This natural midpoint defines just enough government to promote individual liberty, security, prosperity, human innovation and (true) progress, but not so much government that the individual’s interests are subordinated to some nebulous “will” of the “whole people”, as translated by a self-anointed clergy of elites at the federal level, whose goal is to seek power over others. This is the balance that existed in this country, as a functional Republic, until 1865, at which point the sovereign States were eliminated as a viable balance against federal usurpation of power. When – through the use of military conquest – nullification and secession were eliminated as Powers previously reserved to the States by the Tenth Amendment (Powers which had previously been USED to actually constrain federal overreach), the federal government became the sole judge of the limits of the federal government’s powers. It was… a Fundamental Transformation.
Where is the U.S. on this new spectrum? The conventional “wisdom” of the “left-right” paradigm can’t be used to express that, because we have in fact – using that old, invalid paradigm – moved in BOTH directions at once. In that sense alone, my old PoliSci teacher was correct: we’ve moved closer to tyranny. Critically, the “left-right” rhetoric we’re using – and further distorting with efforts like Levin’s – isn’t helping us to slow, much less reverse, that trend.
[In response to Writing On The Wall Dept. at Liberty’s Torch]
We don’t need another revolution. We need a reboot. We have States which did this once, and can do it again. But we need to Take The Red Pill, as a nation, if we are to sweep away the illusion of the Matrix, recognize the singular transgression that has led inexorably to our nation’s impending doom, and avert it. We don’t need another revolution. We need an UN-doing of what was done to our Republic, which made the tyranny of the minority possible.
I am hereby tossing a bomb…***
We were once these United States, a Free Marketplace of Ideas voluntarily united in a common purpose: the defense and celebration of individual liberty and, for the first time in human history, subordination of the state in service of the citizen through institutionalized classical liberalism. That celebration lasted for seventy years.
Then, beginning in April of 1861, war was deceitfully provoked, habeas corpus was suspended, journalists were jailed, press was shut down, jurists were arrested, elections were corrupted, and Southern, agrarian society was relentlessly demonized. Furthermore, racism was institutionalized (no… in the North) and – most egregiously – black slaves and a faux “emancipation” were cynically exploited so as to garner support for an illegal, unnecessary war ostensibly intended to “preserve” the Union… by consciously and cruelly destroying half of it… leaving over one million murdered or maimed Americans in its wake.
That “ugly” half – that slaveholding half… a half which no other civilized nation before or since required warfare to enlighten and correct – was destroyed and, along with it, the Republic, the Republican Form of Government guaranteed by the Constitution, the rule of law, and the dual sovereignty that provided the only effective balance against federal overreach. Prior to 1861 that balance had been expressed most clearly in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, The Hartford Convention, and South Carolina’s Ordinance of Nullification in 1832, which forced the Jackson government to reduce protectionist tariffs that protected banksters and industrialists in the North, while economically damaging the agrarian South. For all practical intents and purposes, in 1865 the federal government essentially declared the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution for the United States of America null, void and no longer binding.
Make no mistake: this is not ‘lost cause’ melancholy; it’s animus and enmity; it is the emotion at the source of that oath on the altar of god, which swears eternal and righteous hostility against the tyranny responsible for the destruction of a lost Republic. It’s Howard Beale desperately trying to expose the sheer, socially suicidal insanity of a federal government being left free to adjudge the limits of its own powers. It’s a Reckoning.
Unfortunately, decades of indoctrination based on 150 years of “history” written by statist victors has tuned the American psyche to a frequency that can no longer accept the need for this reckoning. The little box inside which our thinking has been allowed to function no longer supports the notion of States uniting for any purpose, much less for that of removing the growing cancer that threatens their existence and the liberty of their sovereign citizens. We’re not permitted to think of that turning point in our history because… slavery! We’re not allowed to recognize the newly created Republican party for what it was – crony servants of the railroads, banksters and Northern industrialists – because… slavery! We must avert our eyes from the various legislation passed by Northern white supremacists, intended to prevent the spread of blacks to the new territories, because… slavery! We’re not allowed to learn about the cynicism and hypocrisy of the Corwin Amendment, the men who pledged support for it, or which States actually ratified it, because… slavery! We’ve never been properly schooled on the origins of Liberia and Sierra Leone because… slavery!
An all-purpose, appeal to emotion prevents Americans, to this day, from remembering the history that has left them subjects of an overweening, federal elite. And Santayana is watching. We have been diseducated in a system which openly deifies the State through adulation of a secular Messiah who was almost singlehandedly responsible for the destruction of balanced federalism and who, in turn, cleared a path toward a Leviathan State that is now virtually omnipotent in every way that matters.
To even begin to correct all this, these United States need a reboot. These United States need a convocation of their duly elected legislatures, independent of what has become the tyrannical minority’s federal henchmen. These United States need to starve the federal beast into submission and, ultimately, with the affirmation of at least 30 States, invoke a snap election on the next available April 19th that will replace each and every self-serving, career corrupt-o-crat in D.C. with a newly elected or newly appointed employee who understands in no uncertain terms his or her place as a servant of those States and their sovereign citizens. These States need a renewal of their authority and rightful place as grantors of limited powers to the central government.
It’s my strong conviction that pursuit of this path, however it might be achieved, is preferable to allowing our nation to be destroyed outright (our current course), preferable to an Article V convention (the feds currently in perpetual office ignore the Constitution anyway), preferable to any list of Amendments currently proposed (ditto) and, certainly, preferable to the open, armed conflict between American citizens and Obama’s National Civilian Security Force that feels more tangible with every new federal transgression.
I for one am dead tired of being governed, herded, licensed, taxed, abused, dismissed, robbed, threatened and ridiculed by a bunch of moral adolescents who couldn’t profitably manage a hot dog cart in the parking lot at Wrigley Field. I believe the legislatures of the several States are the last, best hope of this Republic, and that they must be made deadly aware of their responsibility, as time is of the essence. Everything else – who tweeted something ‘offensive’, the latest federal outrage, what Obama is pivoting to or lying about this week, abortion, gay marriage, fake unemployment, inflation and GDP numbers, the global warming hoax… all of this stuff we spend so much time “debating” – is just a distraction from what must be done.
I would rather see nominally controlled chaos and short-term upheaval aimed at a reboot of this kind, while a significant number of citizens are still alive who understand what a Republic is, and is not, than to watch these States be stomped under the boot of totalitarian narcissists whose only goals are their own primacy and control over others.
An Amendment to Re-Establish the Integrity of the General Government
Whereas it is hereby re-affirmed that the several sovereign States are the sole grantors of authority to the general government;
Whereas it is hereby re-affirmed that the Powers of nullification and secession – as well as other Powers not specified in Article I, Section 10 – are reserved to the several States;
Whereas the general government has repeatedly exceeded the constraints placed upon it by the several States, which are the sole grantors of its limited authority;
Be it resolved that, congruent with each mid-term election, when 3/5ths of the several sovereign States’ legislatures shall so affirm,
– a snap general election will be held on April 19th soonest;
– EVERY federal elected office will be replaced (no re-election).
Upon the July 4 inauguration of the newly elected general government, the first order of business will be,
– ALL supreme court justices will be replaced;
– ALL cabinet-level secretarys will be replaced;
– ALL government departments receiving a down-vote from 3/5ths of the States will be eliminated and their functions terminated
Perhaps unaware of who actually said this, someone later reminded me why this Amendment should have been the 11th…
“… if the federal government is allowed to hold a monopoly on determining the extent of its own powers, we have no right to be surprised when it keeps discovering new ones. If the federal government has the exclusive right to judge the extent of its own powers, it will continue to grow – regardless of elections, the separation of powers, and other much-touted limits on government power.”
— Thomas Jefferson Woods
[In response to a comment at Wash. Examiner…, where this post keeps getting “moderated” (aka circular filed)]
Yes. The “center” is a funny thing.
The biggest problem with the notion of a political “center” is that it always seems to be moving irrevocably leftward. And this is supremely relevant to the selection of a candidate like Christie – just as it was with Bush I & II, Dole, McCain and Romney.
Set up a political scale with the Nonexistent State (i.e., anarchy) at the extreme right and an Omnipotent State (i.e., totalitarianism) on the extreme left. The Constitutional Republic originally created by the founders sat pretty squarely in the (true) center of that scale: just enough government to preserve civil order, protect individual liberty, promote economic prosperity and facilitate (true) social progress without overly imposing its own imperatives and the will of the governing elite on the citizenry.
But that all changed in 1861, when the United States were forced through their first fundamental transformation – from a Republic of Sovereign States, connected by a subordinate central government staffed by public servants, into a de facto empire of subordinate revenue sources (aka “States”), ruled via the threat of military force wielded by elitists and documented criminals in Washington, D.C.
On the scale defined above, the nation shifted decidedly leftward after 1865, at which point the identity of the nation ceased to be a true, voluntary union. And the true protection of the People – the sovereignty of the individual States – was essentially lost.
Another fundamental transformation pushed the nation further left in 1913, when government usurped authority over the currency and, with it, the money supply and the economy.
Another fundamental transformation during the 30s pushed the nation further toward an Omnipotent State, when the so-called “New Deal” usurped authority over labor and retirement.
Another in 1965 and, again, in the 70s, and beyond, when government usurped authority over health care and consolidated that authority with unfunded mandates for EMTALA, HMOs, HIPAA, etc., driving the cost of health care to skyrocket at rates multiple times that of baseline inflation, for decades to follow.
The implementation of every single one of these usurpations of authority has been presented as “centrist” – a “compromise”. And yet these shifts have not balanced out – each of them has pushed the U.S. closer and closer to the end of the spectrum labeled “Omnipotent State”.
So what’s “centrist” today? Well, at this point it’s about midway between that original Republic created by the Founders and the extreme left end of the spectrum – the Omnipotent State. You can’t smoke just about anywhere. Owning a firearm identifies one as a clear “threat” to public safety. Sugar, fast food, Big Gulps are off limits. Free speech is stifled by accusations of “racism” whether rationally applicable or not. Government monitors every phone conversation and, likely, every trip to the package store via the GPS in your car… The list goes frighteningly on and on.
Seriously, with all that in mind, does anyone think the election of a “centrist” candidate is a good thing at this point – simply because he’s the only “electable” choice? A good “compromise”?
The way I see it, we’re far better off electing the absolute furthest-left shysters we can find. “Cloward-Piven” their plans in ways they never expected and can’t control. That’ll accelerate the collapse of the screwed up, overweening government they’ve constructed, so we can sooner get about the business of rebuilding from the rubble. It’s destined to collapse anyway. Better that it happens while there are people still living who have SOME idea what the original Republic actually represented.
But that’s just me.
If Obamacare was modeled on Massachusetts’ CommieCare (aka “Romneycare“), I still would like to know which country is going to foot the bill for HALF of Obamacare’s costs. France? UK? Saudi Arabia?
No one ever explained that part of the model.
But as it turns out, CommieCare “works” because every Taxpayer in the other 56 States is helping to pay for HALF of it (http://bit.ly/12alBU8):
Massachusetts will spend approximately $7.6 billion on publicly-funded health insurance in FY 2013. This consists of roughly $12.7 billion on MassHealth and other health reform programs, for which the federal government reimburses the state for approximately half of these costs, leaving the state with a net state cost of approximately $6.4 billion. The Commonwealth will also spend approximately $1.3 billion on health care for public employees.
And wait, it gets even better…
While Massachusetts receives a 50 percent reimbursement from the federal government for Commonwealth Care, the state will receive a 75 percent federal reimbursement when those people move to the newly-expanded Medicaid program. In addition, the new federal health care tax credits, once they become available, will cover health care costs now being paid for with state dollars.
I’m guessing every State in the nation now wishes they’d implemented their own version of CommieCare, in order to qualify for this Taxpayer-funded windfall.
The money will flow despite the delay in the mandate. Why? Because Obamacare is not about providing access to health care. It is about yet another multi-billion-dollar slush fund – just like Social Security and Medicare – used to advance the agenda of the welfare statists, “progressives” and political elite, who’ve abandoned any pretense of fulfilling the Constitution’s express guarantee of a Republican Form of Government.
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