PrintMarch 26, 2010
The Looting of America
Now that we've crossed the bridge to utopia by simultaneously shredding the Constitution and establishing the health-care state, it's worth looking back and seeing March 21, 2010 in the context of recent history. If "fundamentally changing" America means its final destruction, then it seems to have happened in three discrete phases that began long before Obama.
Why and how it happened is much less important than what each of us is willing to do to correct it.
Phase 1: Manufacturing 1990-2000
Well before the Clinton era, in 1991, I remember an acquaintance telling me that California would no longer be a manufacturing power, that its future was as an import-export center. I laughed it off at the time, but within five years, I was startled by this acquaintance's prophecy. Locally, entire business parks became ghost towns. Machine shops, PC board fabrication, painting companies, and a host of other small enterprises that supported larger manufacturing operations vanished from the landscape.
As the Clinton years dragged on, we became numb to the looting. As it became grander and bolder, we watched entire factories pack up and move. We heard the "giant suckin' sound." However, it wasn't coming from the south, but from across the Pacific. By the end of the '90s, we were just beginning to realize that we couldn't buy anything that wasn't made in China. Welcome to the "global economy."
Phase 2: Finance 2001-2010
While the calamity of the elections of 2008 desensitized us to "trillions," an obscure report from the days when billions were still considered real money was completely overlooked. Way back on 9/10/2001, Donald Rumsfeld announced that there was $2.3 trillion missing in Pentagon transactions.
Setting aside all that's happened since that day, waste on this scale in just one federal department is staggering even now. Extending that kind of waste to other federal departments gives an indication of the magnitude of the needless burdens lumped on future taxpayers. For example, is there any doubt that HHS, with an even larger budget than the Pentagon, is worse? With almost nine more years of cover, how much more has been looted?
Conveniently, few noticed that spectacular beginning to the decade of our financial doom. Of course, by the time it was over, trillions were lost in the real estate bubble, and trillions more were thrown on our kids' backs in the frantic borrowing that followed. Unlike the Pentagon swindle, we have a pretty good idea of who made off with that loot.
Nonetheless, here we are: stuck with trillions in lost equity combined with trillions more in debt.
Phase 3: End Game 2010 and Beyond
The frenzied climax that brought us the health care bill delivered the final blow. If it stands, it's hard to see an alternative to the destruction of our way of life and the enslavement of everyone under 70.
If a hostile foreign power managed to seize the federal government with the goal of destroying America and enslaving her people, what would it do differently?
Our founders understood the dangers of powerful central government. They knew that not only would a strong federal government produce a tyranny, but concentrating power in a central government increased the chance that politicians would one day sell the entire country. The Constitution diffused power away from the federal government to prevent both evils. It's no accident that the final blow to the republic came from an act of naked defiance of our Constitution.
Maybe Charlie Trie's generosity to the Democratic Party in the Clinton years wasn't an attempt by the People's Republic of China to buy its way into Washington. Maybe the fishy foreign money in the ¾ billion dollars that bought the White House in '08 was perfectly benign. But can we really afford to believe that?
The proposition couldn't be simpler: Either we reverse this in the next few months or we are the last generation of Americans. If we manage to have elections in November, they are surely our last hope. Our enemies aren't necessarily Democrats, and our salvation doesn't automatically reside with Republicans. Our enemy is corruption, and both parties have a demonstrated spectacular lust for it. That corruption is enabled by the enormous power concentrated in our oversized, unconstitutional federal government.
Our only hope is fielding and electing candidates determined to drive the federal beast back into its constitutional cage.
The "Roman holiday" is over. Either we turn away from our porn, drugs, and games and restore our republic, or we board the cattle cars to the gulag.
Which do you plan to do?
