budbromley

Why isn’t the U.S. economy in a depression right now? The number one reason is because the federal government has stolen more than five trillion dollars from future generations since Barack Obama was elected and has used that money to pump up our grossly inflated standard of living. Whether the federal government spends money wisely or foolishly, the truth is that the vast majority of it still ends up in the pockets of the American people who then use it to buy the things they need for their daily lives. If the U.S. government had not borrowed and spent an extra five trillion dollars that we did not have over the past several years, we would be in the middle of a rip-roaring economic depression right now. So any talk that Barack Obama is “improving the economy” is a total farce. It is a five trillion dollar lie. The reality is that Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress have been stealing trillions of dollars from future generations in order to make things tolerable in the present. If the federal government adopted a balanced budget next year, the debt-fueled prosperity that we are currently enjoying would start disappearing very rapidly and all hell would break loose in America.

At this point, the U.S. national debt is over 15.7 trillion dollars.

When Ronald Reagan took office it was less than a trillion dollars.

If you were to divide the national debt up equally, it would come to more than $50,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

So the share of the national debt for an average family of four would be about $200,000.

When the government borrows and spends money that it does not have, that increases the amount of dollars in circulation and it causes GDP to go up.

That is one of the reasons why our politicians like to borrow and spend money that we do not have. It makes the economic statistics look good. They can point to those economic statistics as a reason to send them back for another term.

This is a major flaw in our system. Most of our politicians do not care about how they are raping future generations financially. Most of them just care about getting elected again.

If you will notice carefully, neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama are promising to balance the budget any time soon. Like so many politicians in the past, they promise to do it “eventually”, but “eventually” never arrives.

According to a recent article in the Washington Times, Mitt Romney declared during a recent campaign appearance that he has no plans to balance the federal budget in his first year….

“My job is to get America back on track to have a balanced budget. Now I’m not going to cut $1 trillion in the first year”

Why would he say that?

Why wouldn’t he want to balance the budget?

He went on to explain that….

“The reason,” he explained, “is taking a trillion dollars out of a $15 trillion economy would cause our economy to shrink [and] would put a lot of people out of work.”

Romney is right about this. Taking a trillion dollars out of a 15 trillion dollar economy would plunge us into an economic nightmare.

And that would make him look bad.

Of course if Obama wins the election we can just expect more of the same from him as well.

For example, just check out what White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew had to say about balancing the budget recently….

“The time for austerity is not today,” Lew told NBC News “Meet the Press.” “If we were to put in austerity measures right now, it would take the economy in the wrong way.”

Why is the time for austerity not today?

It is because the 2012 election is coming up and Obama wants the economic statistics to look good.

But can you blame our politicians for being cowardly?

Just look at what is happening in Greece. After several years of austerity they are in the midst of a full-blown economic depression and they still have not balanced their budget.

Do we want to end up like Greece?

Most Americans do not realize this, but the U.S. already has more government debt per capita than Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain.

So why haven’t we collapsed yet?

Well, because we continue to borrow larger and larger amounts of money.

It took from the founding of America until 1995 for the federal government to accumulate 5 trillion dollars of debt.

Under Obama, we have accumulated more than 5 trillion dollars of new debt in just over 3 years.

Amazingly, Obama has added more to the national debt than George W. Bush did during his entire 8 year term.

And let there be no mistake – George W. Bush was a wild spender. A fiscal conservative he most certainly was not.

But Barack Obama does not seem troubled by any of this.

Barack Obama is prancing about the countryside touting his great “economic plan”, but the truth is that the only reason the economy has not totally collapsed is because he is stealing 150 million dollars an hour from our children and our grandchildren.

Sadly, most Americans don’t understand that the current level of prosperity that we are enjoying is a grand illusion. Most Americans still expect things to return to the way that they used to be, and they are increasingly becoming angry that it is taking so long to get back there.

In fact, a whole host of recent surveys have shown that Americans are very dissatisfied with the direction the economy is heading in….

Four recent surveys have found that on average only 28% of Americans are satisfied with the condition of the country, while 70% are dissatisfied. Three recent surveys have found that between 69% and 83% of Americans believe that the country is still in recession (it isn’t), and only half believe that a recovery is under way.

What they don’t realize is that if we were not massively ripping off our kids and our grandkids things would be much, much worse.

Thomas Jefferson understood that government borrowing is essentially the same as theft from future generations.

He once made the following statement….

And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

What we are doing to our children and our grandchildren is so immoral that it is hard to put into words.

We are running up trillions upon trillions of dollars of debt in their name just so that our lives can be more comfortable right now.

How could we be so selfish?

The sad thing is that even with all of this reckless spending our economy is still not in great shape.

In fact, the middle class continues to shrink at an alarming rate. The following are just a few statistics from a recent article I did about this phenomenon….

-Today, approximately 48 percent of all Americans are currently either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.

-Back in 1960, social welfare benefits made up approximately 10 percent of all salaries and wages. In the year 2000, social welfare benefits made up approximately 21 percent of all salaries and wages. Today, social welfare benefits make up approximately 35 percent of all salaries and wages.

-The United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.

-Every year now, we see millions of Americans fall out of the middle class. In 2010, 2.6 million more Americans descended into poverty. That was the largest increase that we have seen since the U.S. government began keeping statistics on this back in 1959.

-At this point, approximately 22 percent of all American children are living in poverty.

-When Barack Obama took office, there were 32 million Americans on food stamps. Now, there are more than 46 million Americans on food stamps.

So how much worse would things be if a trillion dollars of federal spending was suddenly removed from the economy?

Are you starting to get the picture?

As bad as things are right now, they are about to get a whole lot worse.

So why can’t we just keep on borrowing and spending forever?

Well, just like Greece found out, debt always catches up with you eventually.

During fiscal 2011, the U.S. government spent over 454 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt.

But just like we are seeing in Europe, if confidence in U.S. government debt starts to disappear the U.S. government could end up facing much higher interest rates to borrow money.

If the average rate on U.S. government debt only rose to 7 percent (in the past it has actually been much higher than that), then the U.S. government would be spending about 1.1 trillion dollars a year just on interest on the national debt.

During fiscal year 2011, the U.S. government spent 3.7 trillion dollars but it only brought in about 2.4 trillion dollars.

So if we were spending 1.1 trillion dollars just on interest, that would be close to half of all the revenue the federal government brings in.

Right now, the Federal Reserve is manipulating the system in a desperate attempt to keep interest rates down. During 2011, the Federal Reserve bought up approximately 61 percent of all government debt issued by the U.S. Treasury Department.

But most Americans have no idea how fragile our financial system is.

Most Americans just assume that we will always be the greatest economy on the planet and that there is nothing to be worried about.

Sadly, one way or another this debt bubble is going to burst and then our debt-fueled false prosperity is going to disappear.

Most Americans are not going to understand what is happening and they are going to go absolutely nuts.

AUTHOR: THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG

http://www.yolohub.com/economy/obamas-five-trillion-dollar-lie

Oil and energy are expensive because the supply is controlled by government regulation.  Therein lies the political opportunity for any president or presidential candidate who honestly wants to turn around the U.S. economy.  

Changing over from oil to natural gas would cost a fortune and no one would do it unless government regulations left open no other alternative.  Removing regulations from oil discovery and development would generate money on leases and fees on government lands, 90%+ of which are currently out of bounds in the Obama administration.

What you want is competition between coal, oil, gas, nuclear, geothermal and hydroelectric. That would result in an American renaissance.

Advocating replacement of gasoline and diesel automobile and truck engines with natural gas engines or somehow retrofitting them is not a productive solution to America’s energy problems. The retrofit and new inftrastructure would costs hundreds of billion dollar program. What is the benefit?  Almost nothing.

Once you understand that CO2 is not pollution, there is almost nothing to gain from such a program. But the cost of such a program is huge. There is only a very limited distribution system to supply natural gas to cars and trucks. That would have to built by someone. There would need to be a hugely expensive refit on all the cars and trucks. But there is almost no benefit from all of that.

There is no shortage of gas, oil or coal in American, except the supply shortage that is created by our government.

It is true that natural gas burns cleaner than gasoline and diesel.  But not that much cleaner. Both gasoline and diesel engines as well as their fuels can still be made to run much cleaner than they do today. Cleaner means exhaust is lower in hydrocarbons.  It is not unusual for cars in Europe to get 50+ miles per gallon. The bigger problem is making the vehicles so that they stayed tuned.

In fact, gasoline made from fracking shale oil burns cleaner than the very cleanest crude oil.  In fact, gasoline from shale oil can be pumped out of the well and into the tanker truck to be delivered to the gas station. Did you get that? No refinery is needed and no transportation of crude oil to the refinery is needed either. This is where to spend the R&D dollars. Basically, the shale oil is “cracked” or refined in the well itself. Trucks can literally re-fuel and fill their tanks at the wells ready for the delivery to retail outlets.  And, by the way, methane, ethane, propane, butane, pentane and the other smaller hydrocarbons which are usually made at a refinery for various purposes, those can also be “cracked” at the well, compressed into liquids and pumped into tanks for delivery to the end-use customers. The generator to do all of this can be run by the natural gas from the well itself.  This can all be done today, but there are only one or two of these machines made so far. Covered by patents of course.  When this technology is fully developed, there will be no further need for petroleum refineries.

So, I hope you see, we are focused on the wrong energy goals, all because many people have been made to believe that (1) CO2 is pollution, when in fact it’s plant food, and (2) the “peak oil” theory that the planet is running out of gas and oil, when in fact the planet is still making gas and oil just as it always has done.

Adding ethanol is worse than doing nothing at all. Ethanol creates more real pollution than the gasoline that it is added to, plus to make the ethanol from grains uses a lot of fuel, drives up the cost of food, and at the end of the day adding ethanol to gasoline reduces the mileage of the car. Ethanol is really a subsidy to corporate farmers and certain companies.

Another negative, use of natural gas (methane) as fuel for vehicles will increase the cost of methane in the overall market, which means that it will raise the price of fertilizer (where methane is a key component) and raise the price of natural gas for home energy and where it is used for electric powerplants. Of course, the distribution infrastructure is already in place to deliver natural gas to homes, fertilizer plants and electric power plants.   

“Immoral beyond redemption” An excellent dissection of the issue before America by Walter E. Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University.. http://www.desototimes.com/articles/2012/06/04/opinion/editorials/doc4fcd09b66c4a8109124187.txt

The video at the link blow is a blockbuster invocation by Fr. Andrew at the 2012 Colorado Republican State assembly.

The moral challenges facing our country are not caused by political affiliation, but rather by attacks on religious freedom.  He invites all people of conscience to uphold religious freedom.

“The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modem times with ‘communism’ or ‘socialism.'” – Catechism of the Catholic Church 2425 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xG0x3NsCw3Y

‎”Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”~ John Adams

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” ~ Ben Franklin

“The UN claims that developed countries, including the United States, must cut their CO2 emissions 80% by 2050 or there will be a climate catastrophe. It follows that if these countries can’t cut their CO2 emissions 80%, there will be an unavoidable climate catastrophe. Can the United States cut its CO2 emissions 80%?
The answer is no, and this group of articles will explain why.”

“CO2 Fool’s Errand” See parts 1 thru 3. Donn, the author, is an energy expert retired from GE.

CO2 Fool’s Errand

CO2 Fool’s Errand, Part II

CO2 Fool’s Errand, Part III

The earth is at no risk. This oil came from the earth and to the earth it shall return. Earth pours many thousands of times this amount of oil into the oceans and land every day, and the oceans return a thousand times more. It is humans that are at risk. Humans are losing their souls. They are misguided, lost. Most cannot tell right from wrong. Most think they know and they know nothing. They came here to search and stopped. They became comfortable, arrogant, and greedy. Human arrogance and tiny imagination of God’s creation is the cause of this bruise, and so humans shall suffer the plight of tiny minds and lost souls.

You have a beautiful, huge, old oak tree in your yard, providing you many enjoyments. You don’t care for politics, but your neighbor got the government to make a law that says you cannot have such a tree and they hired a contractor to cut it down. And so they did. And the tree fell on your front porch. Now they are arguing about whose fault it is and who will pay to clean up the mess, but the tree and the things you enjoyed are gone and it will be many years to replace it. Hidden by the crisis is the fact that you lost your liberty.

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you!” ~~ Pericles (430 B.C.)

The universe is a finely tuned design for human habitation, fit for purpose. All the pieces fit and work well together at just the right time. It is far, far too complex and powerful to have occurred by chance; that’s a fact not a belief. Many people of the Book have stopped thinking, afraid to challenge themselves with science, scared the Book might be wrong, believing instead that faith connects the gaps. Similarly, secularists put their faith in science and logic…believing that deeper and deeper study will reveal all the answers. But these are not the only two choices. Today, secularism is overt and in the open, a sign that the globalists / statists/ corporatists believe they now have sufficient control (through education and media) of the American mind, and that people of the Book are incompetent to resist. The globalist weapons are deception, crisis and guilt employed with noblesse oblige…their justification of arrogance … and that the end justifies the means. The earth is not in peril, but your worldview and liberty are being diminished daily.

Understanding the fundamental economic or socionomic trend does not require prediction or speculation of possible future events, actions or inactions. The trend is already set in history, already occurring inexorably. It is an economic tsunami unequalled in our lifetime except by its mirror image. The questions are how to protect yourself from it and how to take best advantage of this giant trend.

The enormous global “baby boom” generation passed its age of borrowing and spending and entered its age of de-leveraging, saving, and downsizing. Boomers are in the “winding down” period of their lives. Spending on the things that drive economic growth has slowed and will continue slowing. The big demographic numbers that grew businesses for houses, cars, furniture, major appliances, etc are declining rapidly. This is the trend which is driving socionomics. This downturn, recession, depression or whatever one wants to call it is not temporary.

This is not an ordinary recession or business cycle. We are in a long term deflation and there is no way to stop it. The demographically very large baby boom generation did not have the third and fourth kids like most of their parents. The generation that followed which is now entering their prime spending years is about 50% smaller, and the next generation is smaller still. Population growth is in a steady decline. (see graphs below)

The bubbles of consumption are collapsing; the historically unprecedented hundreds of trillions of dollars of collateralized debt and the quadrillions of non-collateralized debt and derivatives are imploding worldwide. Be very careful and limited with your ETF’s and options because they are tied to the derivative books of giant banks.

The size and cost of government at all levels must be collapsed…we need major reduction of government debt. Spending by government must be cut to the bone. Deficit spending should be out of the question, but it’s not yet. Government at all levels in the U.S. does not yet have that message. These are government supplied statistics, but government bureaucrats and politicians refuse to face the facts because taxes are the source of their power. They are still trying to raise taxes to maintain government budgets and services. It’s not going to happen. Plan for austerity. The massive boomer population is not paying as much in taxes, and will not be, because their income on average is declining rapidly. Furthermore, boomer spending is declining rapidly, so tax revenue on corporate profits and taxes on salaries overall will be declining… for years to come. In this situation, it irreparably harms nations to emigrate people across borders because jobs are declining almost everywhere; immigration is importing a time bomb.

It can be a conscientious, planned and calm process of deflation or it can be like Greece, Libya or Egypt with violence across the country. That is your vote in the next elections. We are watching a carnival gamblers shell game being played by governments and bankers with our money. So, how is the best way to play this game, or to avoid being played? Cash is and will be king, but which cash?

by Bud Bromley on Friday, October 21, 2011 at 7:23pm (published on Bud’s Facebook notes)

…where “the end justifies the means.”

Barrack Obama, trained and skilled in Alinsky-styled community organizing by agitation,  is using religions and social differences as a surreptitious means to achieve his end goals, nationally and internationally.  But what are Obama’s goals?  And how do you know, since he is willing to lie to achieve his purpose and he is so skilled at doing so? 

For example, Obama has spoken frequently about the idea of uniting the country and the need for bipartisan action.  But his training, skills and actions produce exactly the opposite; blame and class warfare produce divisions and less communication.  He repeatedly talks of helping the poor, but in 2011 more than 46 million (15% of all Americans) got food stamps.  That’s 45% higher than when Obama took office, and twice as high as the average for the previous 40 years. 

In the early to mid-1980s, John L. McKnight helped train Barack Obama in the agitation/infiltration tactics of Saul Alinsky, whose Reveille for Radicals has been a blueprint for the revolutionary activism of “community organizers” since its 1946 publication, as has Alinsky’s 1972 book Rules for Radicals.  Saul “The Red” Alinsky wrote a letter of recommendation for Obama when he applied to Harvard Law School.  Alinsky, the father of community organizing, dreamed of socialism one day replacing the “jungle” of American capitalism.  He wrote that he hoped “for a future where the means of production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful.”  In Rules for Radicals Alinsky wrote, “[t]he job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a ‘dangerous enemy.’

Alinsky dedicated the first edition of his book, “Rules for Radicals,” to Satan: “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer.”

Obama approached Northwestern University professor John L. McKnight – a loyal student of Alinsky’s radical tactics – to pen a letter to Harvard in the late 1980s.” “McKnight, who enforced affirmative action for Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was far more than that to young Obama.  He helped train him in Alinsky’s agitation tactics.    

The Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation (GF) lists McKnight as a board director. From 1985 to 1988, Obama worked for a subsidiary of Gamaliel, where he cut his teeth as a community organizer onChicago’s South Side. McKnight and Gamaliel, which was founded on Alinsky’s principles, provided training for the budding radical Obama.  Before leaving for Harvard, Obama wrote an article published in a journal titled, “After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois,” in which he praised McKnight and his organizing strategies.  While at Harvard, Obama found time to take advanced training courses at the Industrial Areas Foundation, a group founded by Alinsky and affiliated with Gamaliel. He also would return to Chicago to work as a consultant and trainer for Gamaliel.  Obama also served as a trainer for ACORN, the now disbanded organization indicted in multiple states for multiple types of criminal activities.  Under the tutelage of McKnight and other hardcore students of Alinsky, Obama says he got the “best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School.” He made the remark in 2007 while campaigning in Iowa.

GF’s modus operandi is to bring local, inner-city churches into its fold, and then to pressure political and corporate leaders to support Gamaliel’s goals.  Former GF community organizer Rey Lopez-Calderon reports that Gamaliel’s “culture” is exceedingly “strange and warped.”  “[Gregory] Galluzzo,” says Calderon, “told me that he wanted organizers to be tough bastards who could build power like the Conquistadors.” Calderon further reveals that Galluzzo, in seminars, would teach trainees to be “ruthless” in actualizing the premise that “the ends justify the means,” a common underlying method throughout Alinsky’s books.

GF receives much of its funding from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. Yet according to the Roman Catholic Faithful website, the foundation’s “goals and philosophies are at fundamental odds with Church teaching.” In March 2010, David Ricken — the Roman Catholic bishop of Green Bay, Wisconsin–said that certain “principles of the Gamaliel Foundation are inconsistent with the tenets of our Catholic Social Teaching.” Vicar general and Chancellor Father John Doerfler of Northeast Wisconsin specified one particularly problematic GF doctrine: “The end,” he said, “does not justify the means.”

According to Rutgers political scientist Heidi Swarts, who has studied GF extensively, Gamaliel’s organizers engage freely in ideological talk when speaking privately among themselves, but they carefully avoid such talk during their trainings so as not to alienate working-class people. In those settings, the organizers present their ideas as pragmatic, “commonsense solutions” for “working families.”

Like the Gamaliel Foundation itself, GF’s affiliates carefully select non-threatening names that form biblical acronyms.Michigan, for instance, has the Interfaith Strategy for Advocacy & Action in the Community (ISAAC); a Wisconsin affiliate is called Joining Our Neighbors, Advancing Hope (JONAH); and a New Yorkaffiliate is named Niagara Organizing Alliance for Hope (NOAH).

Former Jesuit priest Gregory Galluzzo was executive director of GF for 24 years beginning in 1986.  Gamaliel was restructured as a community-organizing leadership institute that focused on training activists “to build and maintain powerful organizations in low-income communities.” GF has since grown into a network of faith-based community-organizing affiliates with branches in 18U.S.states,South Africa, and theUnited Kingdom.

In the mid-1980s, Galluzzo served as a mentor for a young Barack Obama during the latter’s organizing days in Chicago. The Developing Communities Project, where Obama first worked as an organizer, was (and still is) part of the Gamaliel network. By early 1988, Obama had become a consultant for, and a trainer of, GF community organizers; he would maintain his ties to Gamaliel throughout his years in the U.S. Senate. As Galluzzo said shortly after Obama was elected President in 2008: “Barack has acknowledged publicly that he had been the director of a Gamaliel affiliate. He has supported Gamaliel throughout the years by conducting training [and attending] our public meetings.”

In 2001, Dennis Jacobsen, director of Gamaliel’s National Clergy Caucus, published Doing Justice: Congregations and Community Organizing, a handbook/ideological guide for GF’s religious organizers. Depicting theU.S. as a “sick society” in need of radical transformation, this text derides America’s free-market system for allegedly harming the poor. The author affirms that GF’s goal is to foment public anger and “shake the foundations of this society.”  A self-described “radical Christian,” Jacobsen acknowledges that he has “deep prejudices … against wealthy people.” 

Here’s Stanley Kurtz on Gamaliel and Obama in an article titled “Senator Stealth”:

The same separatist, anti-American theology of liberation that was so boldly and bitterly proclaimed by Obama’s pastor is shared, if more quietly, by Obama’s Gamaliel colleagues. The operative word here is “quietly.”

Gamaliel specializes in ideological stealth, and Obama, a master student of Gamaliel strategy, shows disturbing signs of being a sub rosa radical himself. Obama’s legislative tactics, as well as his persistent professions of non-ideological pragmatism, appear to be inspired by his radical mentors’ most sophisticated tactics. Not only has Obama studied, taught, and apparently absorbed stealth techniques from radical groups like Gamaliel and ACORN, but in his position as a board member of Chicago’s supposedly nonpartisan Woods Fund, he quietly funneled money to his radical allies — at the very moment he most needed their support to boost his political career. It’s high time for these shadowy, perhaps improper, ties to receive a dose of sunlight.

The Gamaliel connection appears to supply a solution to the riddle of Obama’s mysterious political persona. On one hand, he likes to highlight his days as a community organizer — a profession with proudly radical roots in the teachings ofChicago’s Saul Alinsky, author of the highly influential text Rules for Radicals. Obama even goes so far as to make the community-organizer image a metaphor for his distinctive conception of elective office. On the other hand, Obama presents himself as a post-ideological, consensus-minded politician who favors pragmatic, common-sense solutions to the issues of the day.

Candidate and President Obama promised to get unemployment down, but of course unemployment has gone up.  Obama promised to solve the housing crisis, but it has gotten worse (1).  Obama promised to get health care costs down and improve quality, but the cost of health insurance for a family of four has effectively almost doubled.  On the stage in Grant Park, Obama said “I will listen to you,” “especially when we disagree.” And he proclaimed that his would be the most transparent administration, no lobbyists, no crony deals, but today his administration has more secrets than any before him and a super majority of Americans and more than half of U.S.states vigorously and legally oppose Obamacare, which he claims as his crowning achievement. 

Obama’s 2012 campaign website claims that Obama is “The only candidate fighting for the middle class,” but his policies have produced a shrinking middle class with less income, less assets, and out of control debt.  Obama said, “Words are important.”  But there is no connection between his words and his actions.    Citizens would fare better to listen to Obama’s words and then assume he means exactly the opposite.

Princeton Professor Cornel West, an African-American, eagerly shakes the hand of President Barack Obama in June 2010.  Today, West calls Obama “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs.”  Millions of Americans endured financial calamities in the recession.  But for many in the black community, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty. And some experts warn of a historic reversal of hard-won economic gains that took black people decades to achieve.  “History is going to say the black middle class was decimated” over the past few years, said Maya Wiley, director of the Center for Social Inclusion. “But we’re not done writing history.”  Adds Algernon Austin, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy: “The recession is not over for black folks.” Austin thinks more black people than ever before could fall out of the middle class because the unemployment rate for college-educated blacks recently peaked and blacks are over represented in state and local government jobs. Those are jobs that are being eliminated because of massive budget shortfalls.

What does Obama want?  Based on his actions and policies, he wants a huge, permanent increase in the size of government.  This is the “change” he campaigned on, but never described.  His goal is to change the US into a class-based European-style “Social Democracy,” a bureaucratically-driven nanny state with state-controlled capitalism, subservient to a supranational governing oligarchy of global bankers, corporations and elites, all paid for by redistributing wealth away from the middle class.  Religious, cultural and social issues including war are only means to that end.   

Notes and references:

(1) Despite a massive federal bailout of the housing industry, 10.7 million American mortgages were underwater as of September 2011 – meaning the debt on these properties exceeds their fair market value. Another 2.4 million borrowers had an equity stake of less than 5 percent in their homes.  Also, bear in mind that these dismal stats don’t include the nearly four millionU.S.homes that have already been foreclosed on since the recession began in December 2007.

(2) According to the Census, 97.3 million Americans are currently classified as low income. Meanwhile an additional 49.1 million Americans are currently living below the poverty line.  Add those numbers together and you’ve got 146.4 million people – or 48 percent of the country – who are currently either poor or low income, an increase of 4 million people from 2009.  Within that total an estimated 44 million people – or 15 percent of the population – are currently receiving food stamps, a 69 percent increase from 2007.

(3) In 2004, the median net worth of white households was $134,280, compared with $13,450 for black households, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Economic Policy Institute. By 2009, the median net worth for white households had fallen 24 percent to $97,860; the median net worth for black households had fallen 83 percent to $2,170, according to the institute.

(4) The black unemployment rate has risen from 14.7 to 16.2 percent, according to the Department of Labor.

References:

Gamaliel Network

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7004 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamaliel_Foundation

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/226185/senator-stealth/stanley-kurtz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Alinsky

On this Memorial Day, when we are honoring those who died in service to this country, I am deeply concerned that Americans will soon no longer recognize their country and no longer be willing to fight to protect it from those plotting unnatural changes to defeat this country from without and within.

“The President said that he intended to radically transform America. And he is doing it. The nation we were born into is starting to look like a foreign country…”   ~ Daniel Ashton April 26, 2012

“Another way of phrasing the choice we face is whether the Left will be allowed to continue its assault on America and its values – an assault that used to take place in the streets, but now takes place in the Oval Office – or we will put an end to this militant effort to remake America into a place we will soon no longer recognize as home.” ~ David Horowitz

“We need change we can believe in – regime change.  But even if Barack Obama were denied a second term, the forces that produced and sustained him would still be on the attack.  The Freedom Center’s mission is not to defeat the President, but to combat the ideology of the Left that has been working since the 1960’s to infilitrate our universities, our popular culture, and our politics, and whose crowning achievement was to make this President possible.” ~ David Horowitz

Conventional wisdom holds that the political right represents wealth while the left represents the people.  But as David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin detail in their groundbreaking new book, The New Leviathan, the reverse is far closer to the truth.  Since the Sixties, the authors show, the political left has steadily taken control of virtually all of the major philanthropic policy shaping organizations, including Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, MacArthur, Pew, Hewlett, Kellogg, Packard, Casey, and Tides.  Armed with over $100 billion in combined assets – more than 10 times the assets of foundations on the right – these leftwing foundations have been able to fund a universe of think tanks, policy institutes and thinly veiled political movements.  The book describes how the efforts of these foundations have shifted the policy debate in America dramatically to the left, distorting national issues like immigration – where increasingly states are required to treat illegal aliens as American citizens – so that they are unrecognizable from what they were until only recently.

http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/

Is immigration –especially illegal immigration–good for the economy, or bad? This exact question was asked of the late Libertarian economist Milton Friedman. “It’s neither one nor the other,” Mr. Friedman replied. “But it’s good for freedom. In principle, you ought to have completely open immigration. But with the welfare state it’s really not possible to do that.” “If there were no welfare state,” he continued, “you could have open immigration, because everybody would be responsible for himself.”

Was Friedman suggesting that one can’t have immigration reform without welfare reform? He said, “No, you can have immigration reform, but you can’t have open immigration without largely the elimination of welfare.” (1)

I am a libertarian myself on the conservative side and I am no xenophobe. I lived in Mexico City while working for HP. I was responsible for five years for sales and marketing of our products in an Area which included Latin American, southern Africa, the Caribbean, and also Israel for one year. I was specifically posted in Mexico City because at that time our division of HP was doing big deals with Pemex, the Mexican oil company, as well as Mexican government agencies, and many other customers. HP tasked me to interview and to hire many new employees quickly, but not just any new employee.

I was a first hand witness to the destruction of Mexico’s agrarian culture by the United States, begun with the Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986 – which was an amnesty – and continued with the NAFTA treaty and huge U.S. subsidies to U.S. corporate farmers, continuing to this day. Small farmers could not compete with the heavily subsidized prices for their staple corn and wheat. When their farms collapsed, first they moved to Mexico City, but there were no jobs there, then the waves of migrations to America began.

In fact, large groups of Hispanic Americans oppose illegal immigration, oppose high levels of legal immigration, and support the rule of law and support the need for assimilation. Watch this excellent video prepared by several different organizations to explain the problem. Many people in Congress, government and elites need to change their attitudes on immigration or else they must be replaced. “Immigration 110: By the People and For the People.”
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2030490127294344032

That brings me to my first point. There are major cultural and legal differences between the U.S. versus Latin American and African countries (and other countries). We cannot simply open the door and allow all to come here. Business and legal customs in those countries establish expectations and morals that persist. Hundreds of years of imbedded customs do not disappear when someone crosses a national border. I was there to interview and help decide which candidates would be able to abide by U.S. law and HP policy with regard to bribery and also U.S. export laws regarding sales of HP’s high tech equipment to companies and government on various black lists. Bribery was already a well known problem even before this 1980 to 1984 period and it remains a problem today. But the American definition and American law’s definition of bribery, graft, extortion and corruption are not only everyday occurrences in these foreign nations, they are in fact expected business practice in many third world countries.

A similar problem exists in the Middle East and much of the Far East. Following my assignment in Mexico, I lived and worked in Tokyo and was responsible for Japan and Korea. Overlapping all of these assignments for 15 years, I was also responsible for HP’s worldwide business with the International Olympic Committee, and the same bribery problem is well known with IOC events, albeit more sophisticated. I have been taken to the brink, where they would not pay for the HP equipment unless money was transferred to Swiss accounts, and against that, my message was that the event would be unaccredited and teams would not show up if the necessary equipment to test the athletes for performance enhancing drugs was not in place. On my watch, no events were cancelled and no bribes were given by HP.

It takes at least one complete generation for assimilation of immigrants into American culture, probably two in the case of the countries regions I named above. And there are other even more complex cultural problems in other countries, where so far, no one knows if assimilation is possible. For example, in Muslim cultures, it is perfectly acceptable for them to lie in court if the lie protects a fellow Muslim. Obviously, that custom is unacceptable in western jurisprudence. On top of that is the problem that some of the immigrants believe and work toward overcoming our form of government and replacing it with Sharia, or taking over the western states and returning them to Mexico, and then there are the extortive and threatening business tactics of Russian gangs. None of these are small numbers of people in America.

Before getting into the numbers, let me reiterate my first point: immigrants must be assimilated into American culture. Assimilation does not occur if the immigrant moves into a local community in America dominated by their home culture and language. Multiculturalism has failed miserably in Europe and other places. Western European countries that have allowed high immigration are now trying to reverse those policies because their countries have lost their cultures and identities and in many places they have lost control of entire cities and parts of their country.

Do we, here in America, see already negative impacts from the differences in culture and customs? Yes, in long term studies statistics expose rapidly increasing negative impact. Here is one example presented by Dr. heather MacDonald regarding Hispanics, but the problem described is present among other immigrant groups. Dr. MacDonald is John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a Los Angeles native. She also is a recipient of 2005 Bradley Prize for Outstanding Intellectual Achievement.

“Mexican girls—who come from by far the largest and fastest-growing immigrant population–now have the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country. The Mexican teen birthrate is 93 births per every 1,000 girls, compared with 27 births for every 1,000 white girls, 17 births for every 1,000 Asian girls, and 65 births for every 1,000 black girls.”

“Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country. Moreover, 48 percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian births. Only the percentage of black out-of-wedlock births — 68% — exceeds the Hispanic rate. But the black population is not going to triple over the next few decades.”

“There is no greater predictor of future dysfunction than growing up in a single-parent home. Children raised in single-parent homes are at far higher risk of school failure, juvenile delinquency, emotional problems, teen pregnancy, and poverty than children raised by married parents.”

“Gang life is thriving in Southern California schools, and is spreading across the country with the migration of Hispanic immigrants. Crime involvement worsens dramatically from the first to the second generation of Latinos. The incarceration rate of Mexican-Americans is 3.45 times higher than that of whites. A whopping 28% of Mexican-American males in San Diego between the ages of 18 and 24 reported having been arrested since 1995, and 20%reported having been incarcerated — a rate twice that of other immigrant groups.”

“This summer in Southern California, in two separate incidents just weeks apart, Latino gang members fatally gunned down two grandmothers who had confronted them while they were spraying gang graffiti. The gunmen were not recently arrived illegals, but part of a burgeoning Hispanic-American gang culture.”

“I should also mention that Hispanics have the highest school drop-out rate in the country — a recipe for economic decline.”

“These are problems that are currently taboo to speak about, but they must be looked at unflinchingly as we decide what our immigration policy should be. While many immigrants continue to thrive and to enrich our country, too many from the second and third generation of Hispanics are developing behaviors that will fray the social fabric and cost taxpayers millions in welfare and criminal justice outlays.”
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/miarticle.htm?id=5703#.T70XIdzzi68

My next point is that the massive number of immigrants is rapidly sinking the lifeboat that is America, and that is true even if we only consider the legal immigrants. Global humanitarian reasons for current U.S. immigration levels are tested by journalist Roy Beck’s colorful presentation of data from the World Bank and U.S. Census Bureau. This short video has been one of the most viewed policy presentations on the internet.

A modest estimate of the total net cost to American taxpayers for our immigration policy and lack thereof each year is $113 BILLION.

Congress has continued to issue 125,000 new work visas a month to immigrants and other foreign workers. This equals 1.5 million new foreign workers each year, who compete directly with American citizens for a limited number of jobs.

Who benefits from allowing 1.5 million new foreign workers into the U.S. each year? Certainly not the 20 million Americans who are currently unemployed.

Asked whether illegal immigrants strengthen the economy because they “provide low-cost labor and spend money” or harm it because they “don’t all pay taxes but can use public services,” an overwhelming 70% said they believe illegal immigrants create a drain on our economy.

According to Heritage Foundation welfare expert Robert Rector, the overwhelming majority of Americans has it right. Rector reports that over the past four decades the educational level of new immigrants has fallen steadily relative to that of native-born Americans, as have their wages and the rate at which their children and grandchildren achieve economic success. Coupled with very high levels of out-of-wedlock birthrates (among foreign-born Hispanics, for example, the rate is 42.3%), the current illegal population fits the classic profile of a group that, if offered a ready route to citizenship, will consume billions more in welfare benefits than they will contribute in taxes.

The historical pattern whereby new immigrants claim fewer welfare benefits than native-born Americans reversed itself about three decades ago as the size and reach of the welfare state grew. In just the last five years, enrollments in welfare programs have skyrocketed. Medicaid enrollment has grown by 50%, Food Stamps by 49% and Pell Grants by 33%. The earned income tax credit program now provides generous subsidies (over $35 billion annually) to more than 21 million low-wage workers.

Not surprisingly, legal immigrant households are now 50 percent more likely to receive welfare benefits than are the native-born. Immigrants without a high-school degree, moreover, were two and a half times more likely to enroll in these programs. “This underscores,” Rector concludes, “the high potential welfare costs that may be associated with proposed amnesties to illegal immigrants.”

Journalist Roy Beck explains in the chapter titled “The High Cost of Cheap Labor” beginning on page 286 of the pdf file at the link below:

“Finally, it is the local community as a whole that is forced to assume the costs of immigration. While many of the owners of business and capital may view immigrants – whether low-skilled or high-skilled – primarily as a source of cheaper labor, those workers can be quite expensive to the rest of the members of a community. And while come private organizations may promote immigration as a way for them to express charitable feelings, all the other members of a community end up paying most of the costs. In myriad ways, a community subsidizes those who benefit from high immigration.” https://www.numbersusa.com/content/files/pdf/TheCaseAgainstImmigration-RoyBeck.pdf

WE THE PEOPLE ordained and established the Constitution to (1) form a more perfect Union, (2) establish Justice, (3) insure domestic Tranquility, (3) provide for the common defense, (4) promote the general Welfare, and (5) secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. The dereliction of Constitutional duty, failure to protect the borders, the safety of citizens and the rule of law by the President and Congress are simultaneously damaging all five of the fundamental reasons for establishing this nation … the very first sentence of the U.S. Constitution.

Your sovereignty and liberty are at stake here. The government that was established by our Constitution has failed in its most solemn and fundamental duty. We are being invaded by people who openly ignore our laws, march in our streets waving their flags and many openly state they want to take over this country. In the U.S. Constitution, we, the people, give duties and responsibilities to the various parts of government. Our elected President and Congress have all sworn an oath to protect and defend our Constitution. For many years now, our government has been derelict in its duty with regard to immigration, borders and security. If a law is to carry moral duty to obey, then the law must apply equally to all, otherwise that law should not exist. “All men are created equal,” means created equal with respect to the law. Obviously, we are not all created equal by God.

The rule of law and consequently our entire culture and quality of life is degraded by this continuing dereliction of duty by the President and Congress. It is not fair to the businessman who employs legally to make him compete with another business which hires illegal aliens. It is not fair to the legal employees who have to compete for jobs with illegal aliens. It is not fair to the citizen who is paying taxes to support the benefits given to illegal aliens. It is not fair to the student who must compete for admission. It is not fair to the injured who must wait to be treated. It is not fair to the Border Patrol or policeman who has undefined rules of engagement and risks his life while fearing his own prosecution. It is not fair to the homeowner whose neighborhoods are unsafe and property value collapses due to illegal aliens living in sanctuary. It is not fair to the illegal alien who must live with their crime, punishing themselves, compensated less than others, unable and unmotivated to assimilate into our culture and yet rejected by his homeland upon returning because now he and his family are a burden. There are many other examples of unfairness.

Our government has failed. Make no mistake about it. They believe they are in control and even now they are scheming to take our property and rights. But, we are not yet at a point of incivility where we must take up arms against our government. We do not need to waste our resources travelling and marching on Washington, and in that event they would pay no attention. We plan, build our supplies and our networks and then we act. We simply use our resources and cut off their funding and vote them out of office. If it becomes necessary, if our government and elites refuse to listen, then thanks to the internet and social networks, we can communicate and a very large number of us can agree on a date upon which we temporarily stop paying taxes until they meet some conditions. They cannot put us all in jail. We will bring our government back to its proper service of the people.

Thomas Sowell, professor of economy, and fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford summarizes our problem:

“Demography is not destiny. But the history of Balkanized and polarized societies in the 20th century is a history of horrors that we dare not ignore.”

“We are not at that terrible point yet – but that is the direction in which we are headed, under the spell of magic words like “multiculturalism” and “diversity,” which have become substitutes for thoughts, even among those who pride themselves on being “thinking people.”

“Our whole educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities, is permeated with ideologies of group grievances and resentments, painting each group into the corner of its own separate subculture, instead of drawing them into the mainstream of the American culture that made this the greatest nation on earth.”

“Unless the fashionable Balkanization is stopped, demography can become destiny – and a tragedy for all.”

Is demography destiny?

I have followed this subject for over thirty years. Let me know if you would like more information.

(1) Ref: The Romance of Economics: Milton and Rose Friedman: Dinner with Keynes?
BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN