Our Current Political Reality: Where we are now. How we got here. And where it's taking us...

"Bobos" stands for "Bourgeois-Bohemians". People from Ivy-league schools, with capitalist incomes and hippy values, who are the current political class dominating our politics. From the Atlantic Monthly:

HOW THE BOBOS BROKE AMERICA
The creative class was supposed to foster progressive values and economic growth. Instead we got resentment, alienation, and endless political dysfunction.

[...] The class structure of Western society has gotten scrambled over the past few decades. It used to be straightforward: You had the rich, who joined country clubs and voted Republican; the working class, who toiled in the factories and voted Democratic; and, in between, the mass suburban middle class. We had a clear idea of what class conflict, when it came, would look like—members of the working classes would align with progressive intellectuals to take on the capitalist elite.

But somehow when the class conflict came, in 2015 and 2016, it didn’t look anything like that. Suddenly, conservative parties across the West—the former champions of the landed aristocracy—portrayed themselves as the warriors for the working class. And left-wing parties—once vehicles for proletarian revolt—were attacked as captives of the super-educated urban elite. These days, your education level and political values are as important in defining your class status as your income is. Because of this, the U.S. has polarized into two separate class hierarchies—one red and one blue. Classes struggle not only up and down, against the richer and poorer groups on their own ladder, but against their partisan opposite across the ideological divide. [...]

This explains a lot. It doesn't bode well for the country, as we turn on eachother, weakening us and giving our enemies outside, opportunities to exploit.

Read the whole thing. We have to find a better way forward. We have to find common ground again.

Quickly.

     

Jordan Peterson, on Liberals and Conservatives

And why we need them both:

Jordan Peterson (Trump vs Biden 2020 Election)

A plane needs both a left wing and a right wing to fly.  Sometimes, to fly without crashing, it needs to lean more to the left, or more to the right.

It's insanity for one side in our political system to try to destroy the other.   Vilifying half the people in the country, will solve nothing.  A house divided against itself, cannot stand.  We, as a nation, need to straighen up and fly right.   We need to find common ground, and work together to solve our problems.

Or we will crash and burn. 

 The Root of Our Partisan Divide

Christopher Caldwell gets it right, in this analysis.  It's what has polarized our politics so severely.  Unfortunately, he doesn't have a solution.   I don't know that anyone does.

Kamala Harris: an interesting choice

From the Guardian:

What to make of the Kamala Harris VP pick? Our panel's verdict

[...] Harris, like Biden, is a remarkably malleable candidate. She is not an ideologue; she’s a political animal, someone who will move with the changing tides – a representative, one might say. That makes her untrustworthy to people who want a true believer in office. But it also means that the most dynamic movements, such as Black Lives Matter, and the laudable efforts of disappointed Bernie Sanders fans to get more progressives into office, create an environment into which Harris will fit herself. As the Democratic base goes, so go both Harris and Biden. This is good news for the progressives who are winning the hearts and minds of Democratic voters. [...]

[...] In this election, it’s clear that Donald Trump is going to run as a bulwark of law and order who stands between Americans and roving anarchists and antifa. He regularly paints Democrat-run cities as “totally out of control” on crime. In a sit-down interview with Fox anchor Chris Wallace last month, Trump claimed that Biden wants to “defund the police,” which Wallace pointed out was inaccurate on-air.

That line of attack is going to be difficult when your opponents are the author of the 1994 crime bill and a hard-nosed prosecutor who laughed about cracking down on truancy.

In much the same way that partisan discipline put the kibosh on the Tara Reade accusations against Joe Biden, Democrats and the liberal media that support them will put daylight between Democrats and the disorder in the street.

Turns out all the opposition research that progressive activists used against Biden and Harris in the primary is suddenly a strength in the race against Trump. [...]

     

The Trump Win; how we got here

It was a combination of many things, but primarily Hillary's mistakes and weaknesses, combined with shifting demographics and political concerns that transcended party politics:

The Improbable Demographics Behind Donald Trump's Shocking Presidential Victory

[...] The Revolt of Middle America

America is a nation of many economies, but those that produce real, tangible things — food, fiber, energy and manufactured goods — went overwhelmingly for Trump. He won virtually every state from Appalachia to the Rockies, with the exceptions of heavily Hispanic Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, and President Obama’s home base of Illinois.

Some of his biggest margins were in energy states — Texas, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Wyoming, North Dakota — where the fracking revolution created a burst of prosperity. Generally speaking, the more carbon-intensive the economy, the better the Republicans did. Many of his biggest wins took place across the energy-producing regions of the country, including Ohio, Texas, Louisiana, Wyoming, Idaho, and especially West Virginia, where he won by a remarkable margin of 68% to 27%. The energy industry could well be the biggest financial winner in the election.

The Green Trap

Clinton’s support for climate change legislation, a lower priority among the electorate than other concerns, was seen as necessary to shore up support from greens threatening to attack her from the left. Yet the issue never caught on the heartland, which tends to see climate change mitigation as injurious to them.

This may have proven a major miscalculation, as the energy economy is also tied closely to manufacturing. Besides climate change, the heartland had many reasons to fear a continuation of Obama policies, particularly related to regulation and global trade, which seems to have been a big factor in Trump’s upset win in normally moderate to liberal Wisconsin.

Trump either won, or closely contested all the traditional manufacturing states — Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa and even Michigan, where union voters did not support Clinton as they had Obama and where trade was also a big issue. Trump did consistently better than Romney in all these states, even though Romney was a native of Michigan. Perhaps the most significant turnaround was in Ohio, which Obama won with barely 51% of the vote in 2012. This year Trump reversed this loss and won by over seven points.

Agricultural states, reeling from the decline of commodity prices, not surprisingly, also went for the New Yorker.

Premature Epitaphs For The White Voter

Race, as is often the case, played a major role in the election. For much of the election, commentators, particularly in the dominant Eastern media, seemed to be openly celebrating what CNN heralded as “the decline of the white voter.” The “new America,” they suggested, would be a coalition of minorities, educated workers and millennials.

To be sure, the minority share of the electorate is only going to grow — from less than 30% today to over 40% in 2032 — as more white Americans continue to die than be born. Just between 2012 and 2016, the Latino and Asian electorate grew 17% and 16%, respectively; the white electorate expanded barely 2%.

In Colorado the new minority math was seen, with a strong showing among Latinos, the educated suburbs around Denver and millennials.

That may be the future, but now is now. Exit polling nationwide showed Trump won two-to-one among people without a college degree, matched Clinton among college graduates, losing only those with graduate degrees, a group that has voted for the Democrats since 1988.

But there’s simply more high school graduates then those with graduate degrees. And for now there are a lot more whites than minorities. As we look into the future, these groups will fade somewhat but right now they can still determine elections. Nowhere is this clearer than in Trump’s decisive win in Florida, a state that is home to many white retirees, including from the old industrial states.

Latinos may be the one group in the “new America” that made a difference for Clinton, not only in Colorado, but also in Nevada. Republicans paid a price for Trump’s intemperate comments on immigration and about Mexico.

They also made states like Texas and North Carolina closer, and may have helped secure Clinton’s win in Virginia. In contrast, neither African-Americans or millennials seem to have turned out as heavily, both in numbers and percentage terms, as they did for President Obama. Trump appears to have made some modest gains with both groups, contrary to the conventional wisdom.

Class Warrior

Class has been a bigger factor in this election than in any election since the New Deal era. Trump’s insurgency rode largely on middle- and working-class fears about globalization, immigration and the cultural arrogance of the “progressive” cultural elite. This is something Bill Clinton understands better than his wife.

Trump owes his election to what one writer has called “the leftover people.” These may be “deplorables” to the pundits but their grievances are real – their incomes and their lifespans have been decreasing. They have noticed, as Thomas Frank has written, that the Democrats have gone “from being the party of Decatur to the party of Martha’s Vineyard.”

Many of these voters were once Democrats, and feel they have been betrayed. And they include a large swath of the middle class, whose fury explains much of what happened tonight. Trump has connected better with these voters than Romney, who won those making between $50,000 and $90,000 by a narrow 52 percent margin. Early analysis of this year’s election shows Trump doing better among these kind of voters.

At the same time, however, affluent voters — those making $100,000 and above — seem to have tilted over to the Democrats this year. This is the first time the “rich” have gone against the GOP since the 1964 Goldwater debacle. Obama did better among the wealthy, winning eight of the 10 richest counties in 2012. In virtually all these counties, Clinton did even better.

What does this mean for America’s traditional middle class, whose numbers have been fading for a generation? Long the majority, notes Pew, they are no longer, outnumbered by the lower and upper classes combined. Yet like the Anglo population, in this election what’s left of America’s middle class has shown itself not ready to face the sunset.

Now What?

Given the unpredictable nature of Trump, it’s hard to see what he will do. Although himself a businessman, he was opposed overwhelmingly by his own class. Clinton won more support from big business and the business elite. If you had a billionaire primary, Clinton would have won by as much as 20 to 1.

Initially many of those business interests closest to both Obama and Clinton — Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood — will be on the outside looking in. Their advantages from tax avoidance could be lessened. Merger-mania, yet another form of asset inflation, will continue unabated, particularly in the tech and media space.

The clear challenge for (I can’t believe I am writing these words) President Trump will not be so much to punish these enemies, but to embrace those people — largely middle class, suburban, small town and white — who are not part of his world, but made him President. If he embraces his role as a radical reformer, he could do much good, for example with a flatter tax system, restoring federalism, seizing the advantage of the energy revolution and reviving military preparedness. [...]

If you read the whole thing, I think you will sense that the author does not like Donald Trump. Which rather makes his astute observations about Trump all the more interesting.

The long and short of it is, the elites in both the Republican and Democrat parties miscalculated a number of things. The Donald spoke to the people most neglected by the elites, and they selected him as their champion. We now have a Populist President, who is not really a Republican or a Democrat, by the standards used up until now.

Is The Donald prepared to lead? He has never been elected to any position, so we can't know how he will govern. Where will he take us, what will he do? We shall see...


Also see:

Doggedness and Defiance: How Trump won

     

Elites in Both Parties Created Trump's Triumph

Here are three articles from Salon.com that make interesting observations:

We can’t vote for either one: On world stage, Clinton and Trump present different, but serious, dangers
It is pathetically impossible to determine which one would be worse, the only metric we have left. It's OK to pass

[...] The best that can be said of this political season is that the fixed framework of American politics appears to be fracturing. This will be a fine thing if it proves to be so, and I view this development as especially important in its medium-term potential on the foreign policy side. The question is whether things will truly fall apart, or at least begin to do so. Two policies hang in the balance above all others—the relationship with Israel and our fomented confrontation with Russia—and I will return to them.

For now we must accept that the process of coming apart, while desirable, could never be other than messy. And neither could we rightly expect to define its form. Political irruptions of the kind we witness are almost always uncontrollable during certain stages. Nobody knows where the water will go when the river overflows its banks. In this case, we have an egregious candidate who stands outside the political superstructure, apparently prompting paroxysms within the policy cliques and what we call the deep state, and an egregious candidate whose priority in all spheres is to reinforce both. I leave readers to assess the implications here as they might, but there is no denying it is a hard call.

[...]

Clinton, we have to conclude without qualification, holds out zero promise of an altered direction in American foreign policy. So far as I can make out, she has never once in her decades of public service evinced any modicum of imagination or original thought on a foreign policy question. This applies to means as well as ends. Clinton is shoulder-to-shoulder with Defense Secretary Carter on every question wherein their views have intersected and aired: NATO’s eastward thrust, the power transformation in the western Pacific, Syria, Iraq, the Middle East altogether. She could comfortably reappoint Carter as President Obama reappointed the hawkish Robert M. Gates (to the astonishment and dismay of many). There has been talk she could name Vicky Nuland secretary of state—more feminist progress, we would be advised in such an eventuality.

Clinton famously declared a “reset” in Russian relations during her early years as Obama’s secretary of state—amateurishly sending Sergei Lavrov some cutie-pie button so marked. (The Russian foreign minister must have looked at the ceiling half in despair.) We understood—or the Russians did, anyway—what this meant quickly enough: Let’s get back to the Yeltsin-era subservience. Vladimir Putin’s sin lies solely in his refusal; the rest is Washington’s expertise in crowd control—we being the crowd—and the Pentagon’s desire to keep defense contractors in double-digit profits.

[...]

My starting point with Trump is his position on American exceptionalism. It is implicit but discernible. He plainly considers America the greatest of great nations, fine, but he runs on the premise that it is great no longer. As the TomDispatch web site pointed out Thursday, “The Donald is the first American presidential candidate to openly campaign on a platform of American decline, while Hillary is still stuck in a world of too-many-superlatives for the waning American century.”

[...]

Here he is last Wednesday on the O’Reilly Factor, the Fox News program, when asked about the Pentagon’s recent allegations that Russian jets flew imprudently close to American ships in the Baltic. I would have said American ships sail imprudently close to Russian waters, but never mind:

“If it were me, I will tell you, I would call him [Putin] and say, ‘Don’t do it. Just stop it. Don’t do it.’ … Let’s go. Come on. We’re going to have a good relationship. Don’t do it.’”

“Don’t do it,” as an Irish journalist named Danielle Ryan has since pointed out, “is not some revolutionary position on Russia.” Of course not, and one would never select The Don to quarterback any genuine reset in Washington’s relations with Moscow. But it is impossible, simply impossible, to ignore the core thoughts: Trump takes us back to the pre-Bush II era, that time long ago when American presidents and State Department secretaries did not refuse contact with adversaries or those with alternative views. Trump would talk, not bomb, shell, sanction or subvert. He is not phobic with regard to the Russians. He does not demonize others with other perspectives. This is a positive value out of anyone’s mouth. Excellent he has introduced it into the conversation.

[...]

Hillary Clinton derives from a tradition from which American policy must break. Donald Trump by definition derives from no tradition. One cannot vote for the former, but it does not follow one therefore votes for the latter. Sanders supporters and various stripes of Hillary-haters who now contemplate voting for Trump—and one hears of many—should take note. Too many problems attaching to Trump.

To call Trump’s foreign policy thinking inchoate is too indulgent, given it implies he is doing his thinking and is not yet finished. I do not see that he has or is. In my read he still draws from the raw instinct that has propelled him in business, wherever that may be. He is a seat-of-the-pants man as yet. So we do not truly know what he would do in any given case.

He does not grasp the reality of complexity, let’s say. As noted in a previous column, there is some likelihood that the policy cliques will shove him into a crash course on the orthodoxy and the deep state’s protocol now that he is unambiguously the Republican candidate. But we do not know this yet, either.

We do not know much, in short. I confess to liking Trump’s capacity to connect with undercurrents in American society and culture that the elites of both parties have ignored with impunity for decades now. Deprivation and abuse among muddled-thinking people—political, social, economic—is no different from deprivation and abuse among the clear-minded. But this is not the same as elevating ignorance, xenophobia and “America First” nationalism to a position requiring respect.

All this puts him well beyond the pale. No vote for Trump, then.[...]

So don't vote at all? Usually I say, vote for the one who would do the least damage. Is it impossible to tell? Difficult, I concede, but I'm not entirely convinced that not voting is the answer. Though living on the West coast as I do, I have to say that I have lost any confidence that my vote has counted in any presidential election ever. Before the polls even close in the West, the Media is on the air announcing the winner. People East of the Mississippi pick the president, the rest of us... not so much.

I believe Governor's make better Presidential candidates, because they have held elected office and you can see how they chose to govern. But where are they in this election cycle? Gone. Which leaves us with:

Our awful elites gutted America. Now they dare ring alarms about Trump, Sanders — and cast themselves as saviors
Both parties ignored workers, spewed hate, enriched themselves, hollowed out democracy. Now the problem's populism?

[...] Elites on both sides insisted on not addressing the root causes of economic dissatisfaction, hence the long-foreseen rise of Trump. Paul Krugman, a Hillary acolyte, is nothing more than a neoliberal, whose prescriptions always stay strictly within orthodox parameters. Yet he was construed as some sort of a liberal lion during the Bush and Obama years. Not for him any of Bernie’s “radical” measures to ensure economic justice and fairness. Oh no, we have to stay within the orthodoxies of the economics profession. Now he’s all offended about Trump!

The worst offenders of all are the American left’s cultural warriors, who daily wage some new battle over some imagined cultural offense, which has nothing to do with the lives of normal people but only the highly tuned sensibilities of those in the academic, publishing, and media ecospheres.

The Hillary supporters have the authoritarian mentality of small property owners. They are the mirror image of the “realist” Trump supporters, the difference being that the Trump supporters fall below the median income level, and are distressed and insecure, while the Hillary supporters stand above the median income level, and are prosperous but still insecure.

To manipulate them, the Democratic and Republican elites have both played a double game for forty years and have gotten away with it. They have incrementally yet quite comprehensively seized all economic and political power for themselves. They have perverted free media and even such basics of the democratic process as voting and accountability in elections. Elites on both sides have collaborated to engineer a revolution of economic decline for the working person, until the situation has reached unbearable proportions. The stock market may be doing well, and unemployment may theoretically be low, but people can’t afford housing and food, they can’t pay back student loans and other debts, their lives, wherever they live in this transformed country, are full of such misery that there is not a single word that an establishment candidate like Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush says that makes sense to them.

This time, I truly believe, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them. When they did have a difference to choose from—i.e., the clear progressive choice, Bernie over Hillary, who consistently demonstrates beating Trump by double the margins Hillary does—the elites went for Hillary, even though she poses the greater risk of inaugurating Trump as president. And now you want us to listen to your panic alarms?

The game, for the elites, is over. This is true no matter what happens with the Sanders campaign. The Republican party as we have known it since the Reagan consensus (dating back to 1976) is over. The Democratic party doesn’t know it yet, but Bill Clinton’s neoliberalism (and what followed in his wake with complicity with Bush junior, and the continuation of Bush junior’s imperialist policies with Barack Obama) is also over, or well on its way to being over. The elites are in a cataclysmic state of panic, they don’t know whether to look right or left, they have no idea what to do with Trump, they don’t know what to do with the Bernie diehards, they have no idea how to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

[...]

The election of Trump would end the Republican party as we know it, but more refreshingly it would also end the Democratic party as we know it. The limits of the academic left’s distracting cultural discourse in keeping economic dissatisfaction in check would be fully exposed. Trump threatens the stability of the fearmongering discourse of Sullivan and his like. The threat to their monopoly of discourse is the real reason for the panic.

Oh, and Hillary, good luck fighting Trump with your poll-tested reactions. Your calculated “offenses” against his offensiveness against women or minorities or Muslims are going to be as successful as the sixteen Republicans who’ve already tried it. You won’t be able to take on Trump because you do not speak the truth, you speak only elite mumbo-jumbo. Trump doesn’t speak the truth either, but he’s responding to something in the air that has an element of truth, and you don’t even go that far, you speak to a state of affairs—a meritocratic, democratic, pluralist America—that doesn’t even exist. [...]

The election of Trump ending BOTH parties as we know them? In a way that does sound good... but what would they be replaced with? A Viking Raider, perhaps? Read on:

It’s not about sexism: Camille Paglia on Trump, Hillary’s “restless bitterness” and the end of the elites
We don't know if Trump can morph into a statesman. We do know the media/political class fears his threat to Hillary

[...] In our current campaign, the obvious strategy by Democratic operatives to disrupt Donald Trump’s rallies and link him to brewing fascism (via lurid media images of wild-eyed brawlers) has backfired with a bang. The seething demonstrators who blocked Trump’s motorcade at last week’s state GOP convention in Burlingame, California, forcing him and his retinue to ditch their vehicles and sprint to a rear entrance on foot, managed to alienate mainstream voters, boost Trump’s national momentum, and guarantee his sweeping victory in this week’s Indiana primary. With the withdrawal of Ted Cruz, Trump is now the presumptive GOP nominee. Great job, Dem wizards!

The helicopter TV footage of Trump and his Secret Service detail on the move was certainly surreal. All those beefy men in shiny, dark suits rapidly filing through narrow concrete barriers (like cattle chutes at a rodeo) and then scrambling up a grassy knoll! [...] The optics of the aerial photos made Trump look like a late Roman emperor being hustled to safety by the Praetorian Guard, which over time had become a kingmaker, supplanting the authority of the Senate and the old patrician class.

Trump has knocked the stilts out from the GOP establishment and crushed the pretensions of a battalion of political commentators on both the Left and Right. Portraying him as a vile racist, illiterate boob, or the end of civilization as we know it hasn’t worked because his growing supporters are genuinely motivated by rational concerns about border security and bad trade deals. Whether Trump, with his erratic impulses and gratuitous crudities, can morph toward statesmanship remains to be seen.

[...]

The aerial view of Trump at Burlingame gave me a moment of gender vertigo. His odd, brassy blonde hairdo, which I normally think of as a retro Bobby Rydell quiff, looked from behind like a smoothly backcombed 1960’s era woman’s bouffant. Shelley Winters flashed into my mind, and then it hit me: “It’s all about his mother!” I had never seen photos of Mary MacLeod Trump (who died at 88 in 2000) and immediately looked for them. Of course, there it was—the puffy blonde bouffant to which Trump pays daily homage in his impudent straw thatch.

In their focus on Trump’s real-estate tycoon father, the media seem to have missed that the teetotaling Trump’s deepest connection was probably to his strong-willed, religious mother. Born in the stark, wind-swept Hebrides Islands off the western coast of Scotland (the next North Atlantic stop is Iceland), she was one tough cookie. She and her parents were Gaelic speakers, products of a history extending back to the medieval Viking raids. I suddenly realized that that is Trump’s style. He’s not a tribal Highlander, celebrated in Scotland’s long battle for independence from England, but a Viking, slashing, burning, and laughing at the carnage in his wake. (Think Kirk Douglas flashing his steely smile in the 1958 Hollywood epic, The Vikings.) Trump takes savage pleasure in winning for its own sake—an attribute that speaks directly to the moment, when a large part of the electorate feels that the U.S. has become timid and uncertain and made far too many humiliating concessions to authoritarian foreign powers like China, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Despite their show of bravado, most savvy Democratic strategists have surely known for months that Trump was by far the most formidable of Hillary Clinton’s potential opponents—which is why they’ve been playing the race and riot cards against him to the max. Hillary has skimmed along in her bouncing gender bubble, virtually untouched by her too chivalrous Democratic rivals. Far from Hillary (in this election cycle or the last) having a harder time as a woman candidate, she has been habitually shielded by her gender. At the early debates, for example, Martin O’Malley was paralyzed by his deference to her sacred womanhood and hardly dared raise his voice to contest her brazen untruths from three feet away. Meanwhile, in debate after debate, unconstrained by the sycophantic media moderators, Hillary rudely interrupted, talked over both O’Malley and Bernie Sanders, and hogged airtime like it was going out of style. Not until CNN’s April 14 debate in Brooklyn on the eve of the New York primary did moderators forcibly put a lid on Hillary’s obnoxious filibustering.

The most pernicious aspect of this Democratic campaign is the way the field was cleared long in advance for Hillary, a flawed candidate from the get-go, while an entire generation of able Democratic politicians in their 40s was muscled aside, on pain of implied severance from future party support. It is glaringly obvious, given how well Bernie Sanders (my candidate) has done despite a near total media blackout for the past year, that Hillary would never have survived to the nomination had she had younger, more well-known, and centrist challengers. Hillary’s front-runner status has been achieved by DNC machinations and an army of undemocratic super-delegate insiders, whose pet projects will be blessed by the Clinton golden hoard. Hillary has also profited from Sanders’ too-gentlemanly early tactics, when he civilly refrained from pushing back at key moments, such as the questionable Iowa and Nevada caucuses, which he probably would have won had there not been last-minute monkey business by party operatives. [...]

And so it grinds on. I do agree with the one author though, that Trump's success is a direct result of the actions of the political establishment that is attacking him. In a sense, they created his success by the things they have done over the past decades. Are the majority of Americans turning against the political establishment "Elites" in both parties?

Perhaps we shall see in November. Meanwhile, people on both sides can sing "It's My Party And I'll Cry If I Want To".
     

Is this what successful foreign policy looks like?

Yes. Successful for Iran:

This humiliating Iran photo says it all

The Obama administration, the mainstream media and Democrats more generally vastly underestimate the potency of the photos and videos showing our Navy sailors on their knees with hands behind their heads as they are taken into custody by the Iranians. It is the perfect embodiment of what many Americans see as the humiliation suffered by the United States under this president as our adversities defy us and take advantage at every turn. To then have the utterly tone-deaf Secretary of State John Kerry insist that we did not apologize, but then publicly thank Iran, is even worse. And to top it off, we have film of our sailors held captive, compelled to apologize. The sole female sailor apparently was compelled to don a head covering.

This, according to President Obama and Hillary Clinton, is what a successful Iran policy looks like. No wonder Donald Trump, who speaks to the rage Americans feel about our declining respect in the world, is striking a chord.

[...]

The White House won’t dream of making a fuss, not when it so desperately wants to lift sanctions on Iran and push forward on the Iran nuclear deal, the very deal that has emboldened Iran to engage in stunts like this one. Oh, the administration is going to be “looking into the videos and would respond if the U.S. determined that the sailors were treated inappropriately.” Don’t hold your breath.

This is a propaganda bonanza for Tehran, one that it will exploit to the hilt to make clear to its allies and those it seeks to intimidate that the United States is weak, unreliable and useless. It furthers their ambitions in the region and demoralizes those resisting Iranian aggression. For countries and individuals on the fence (e.g. the Sunni tribes), the message is clear: You really want to stick your neck out for the Americans?

Bizarrely, Kerry thinks this shows how terrific our new relationship with Iran is because, you know, we got our people back. By continuing to act in effect as a PR flack for Tehran, Kerry invites further aggression and endangers our own troops and those of our allies. Be prepared to see Iran’s conduct become infinitely more audacious once it has pocketed more than $100 billion in sanctions relief. [...]

Read the whole thing for links and more. And get used to it. It's the Democrats Foreign Policy, and it's not going to change anytime soon.

     

Are their different "flavors" of capitalism and socialism? What should we choose?

Is the pope stirring the pot for the communists?

In Fiery Speeches, Francis Excoriates Global Capitalism

[...] Having returned to his native Latin America, Francis has renewed his left-leaning critiques on the inequalities of capitalism, describing it as an underlying cause of global injustice, and a prime cause of climate change. Francis escalated that line last week when he made a historic apology for the crimes of the Roman Catholic Church during the period of Spanish colonialism — even as he called for a global movement against a “new colonialism” rooted in an inequitable economic order.

The Argentine pope seemed to be asking for a social revolution.

[...]

Francis has defined the economic challenge of this era as the failure of global capitalism to create fairness, equity and dignified livelihoods for the poor — a social and religious agenda that coincides with a resurgence of the leftist thinking marginalized in the days of John Paul II. Francis’ increasingly sharp critique comes as much of humanity has never been so wealthy or well fed — yet rising inequality and repeated financial crises have unsettled voters, policy makers and economists.

Left-wing populism is surging in countries immersed in economic turmoil, such as Spain, and, most notably, Greece. But even in the United States, where the economy has rebounded, widespread concern about inequality and corporate power are propelling the rise of liberals like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who, in turn, have pushed the Democratic Party presidential front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to the left.

[...]

Even as he meets regularly with heads of state, Francis has often said that change must come from the grass roots, whether from poor people or the community organizers who work with them. To Francis, the poor have earned knowledge that is useful and redeeming, even as a “throwaway culture” tosses them aside. He sees them as being at the front edge of economic and environmental crises around the world.

In Bolivia, Francis praised cooperatives and other localized organizations that he said provide productive economies for the poor. “How different this is than the situation that results when those left behind by the formal market are exploited like slaves!” he said on Wednesday night.

It is this Old Testament-like rhetoric that some finding jarring, perhaps especially so in the United States, where Francis will visit in September. His environmental encyclical, “Laudato Si’,” released last month, drew loud criticism from some American conservatives and from others who found his language deeply pessimistic. His right-leaning critics also argued that he was overreaching and straying dangerously beyond religion — while condemning capitalism with too broad a brush.

“I wish Francis would focus on positives, on how a free-market economy guided by an ethical framework, and the rule of law, can be a part of the solution for the poor — rather than just jumping from the reality of people’s misery to the analysis that a market economy is the problem,” said the Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, which advocates free-market economics.

Francis’ sharpest critics have accused him of being a Marxist or a Latin American communist, even as he opposed communism during his time in Argentina. His tour last week of Latin America began in Ecuador and Bolivia, two countries with far-left governments. President Evo Morales of Bolivia, who wore a Che Guevara patch on his jacket during Francis’ speech, claimed the pope as a kindred spirit — even as Francis seemed startled when Mr. Morales gave him a wooden crucifix shaped like a hammer and sickle as a gift.

[...]

The French economist Thomas Piketty argued last year in a surprising best-seller, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” that rising wealth inequality is a natural result of free-market policies, a direct challenge to the conventional view that economic inequalities shrink over time. The controversial implication drawn by Mr. Piketty is that governments should raise taxes on the wealthy.

Mr. Piketty roiled the debate among mainstream economists, yet Francis’ critique is more unnerving to some because he is not reframing inequality and poverty around a new economic theory but instead defining it in moral terms. “Working for a just distribution of the fruits of the earth and human labor is not mere philanthropy,” he said on Wednesday. “It is a moral obligation. For Christians, the responsibility is even greater: It is a commandment.”

Nick Hanauer, a Seattle venture capitalist, said he believed Francis was making a nuanced point about capitalism, embodied by his coinage of a “social mortgage” on accumulated wealth — a debt to the society that made its accumulation possible. Mr. Hanauer said that economic elites should embrace the need for change both for moral and pragmatic reasons.

“I’m a believer in capitalism but it comes in as many flavors as pie, and we have a choice about the kind of capitalist system that we have,” said Mr. Hanauer, now an outspoken proponent of redistributive government policies like a higher minimum wage.

Yet what remains unclear is whether Francis has a clear vision for a systemic alternative to the status quo that he and others criticize. “All these critiques point toward the incoherence of the simple idea of free market economics, but they don’t prescribe a remedy,” said Mr. Johnson, of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Francis acknowledged as much, conceding on Wednesday that he had no new “recipe” to quickly change the world. Instead, he spoke about a “process of change” undertaken at the grass-roots level. [...]

This pope has a strong history of being an advocate for the poor. I get it, and don't think anything is wrong with that. It's just that he seems out of touch with the modern world and how it works. He has spend so much time working with the poor, that it's all he sees; with out a more balanced understanding of the larger whole, and no clear plan for change... what is he doing?

Stirring up revolution against people who create wealth, calling for the redistribution of wealth, without any sort of plan as to how that should be done... how is that any different from the Communism of the past, that has wrought so much death and destruction? And when will the Vatican put it's money where it's mouth is, and return all the gold and priceless treasures they've ripped off from around the world?

Instead of cursing the darkness, why not light a candle? Why not focus on the more positive aspects of capitalism and how it can be used to lift people out of poverty, be used wisely and compassionately, steer the conversation in more constructive ways, rather than just painting all capitalists with a tar-brush and stirring the pot for communist revolutionaries? I think perhaps this pope, however well-meaning, doesn't have the broader perspective or the brain-power to be able to do that.

Here at home, we have Bernie Sanders and followers, wanting us to drink his flavor of Kool-Aid:

How Bernie Sanders plans to win, and change Washington

[...] In an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday, Sanders said that the president ran "one of the great campaigns in the history of the United States of America" in 2008, but he also made a mistake by trying to negotiate fair compromises with Republicans and their leadership in Congress.

"The truth is Republicans never wanted to negotiate, all they wanted to do is obstruct," Sanders said. "What I have said throughout this campaign is electing Bernie Sanders as president is not enough. Not going to do it. We need a mass grassroots movement that looks the Republicans in the eye and says, 'If you don't vote to demand that your wealthy people start paying their fair share of taxes, if you don't vote for jobs, raising the minimum wage and expanding Social Security, we know what's going on, we're involved, we're organized, you are outta here if you don't do the right thing.'"

He plans to build that grassroots coalition by bringing more people into the political process and focusing heavily on poverty and income inequality.

"I'm going to be going around the country not only to blue states...but to red states, conservative states. We're going to go to Alabama, we're going to go to Mississippi," Sanders said. "I think the message that we have is resonating. People are going to get involved in the political process, we're going to drive turnout up and when we do that we win." [...]

He sounds like he's the one that doesn't want to negotiate anything. I'm always amazed when Democrats become outraged that the Republicans don't just roll over and play dead. As if it's a crime to disagree with them.

I agree with one of the comments below the article; we don't need any ONE group of people telling us all what to do and how to live.

Also in the comments, someone holds up Denmark and Germany as examples of socialism that "works"; should we, could we not follow them as examples of the way civilized people should live?

That's the progressive dream. It's tempting to say yes. If it works, why not?

Those particular countries have been very careful to maintain a balance between wealth re-distribution and fostering the conditions for the creation of wealth. And perhaps that IS the civilized thing to do. I just have doubts that the pope or Bernie really understand that balance. It's easy to advocate the redistribution of wealth. But if the people who create wealth no longer have the motivation to do so, the redistributed funds dry up, and when there are no more, then everyone ends up poorer.

Most of the nations around the world have overspent more than they have created. Until they demonstrate that they understand the balance between spending and wealth creation, I would not encourage their redistribution efforts. It will only end badly. Such stupidity CAN only end badly.

I've posted previously about the likely future of world economics and the needed flexibility of the new economic reality of the global economy in the Brave New World we are becoming. A good deal of "workable" socialism or socialist ideas may be built into it. If it works, then so be it. Perhaps it will be true progress. It's just that, where will it lead us, unless we are VERY careful?

Every communist I've ever known (and I've known quite a few) has told me that socialism is not an end goal in itself; it's merely a stepping-stone to communism. Socialism gets people used to the idea that the government has the right to redistribute wealth and control people's lives for "the greater good". Once the people become dependent on the government for their needs, then democracy and capitalism and be abolished as "unnecessary", and the government can own and run everything. Which is essentially, one group of people telling everyone else what to do and how to live.

But, people could get "stuck" on socialism that "works"; they get too comfortable, and stop "progressing". The communist's answer to that is to overload the system till it no longer works; destroy the balance, keep spending until the system collapses. Capitalism can then be declared "dead", and replaced with communism. By then the people will be so dependent on the government and so fearful that they will gladly trade freedom for security. And if history is any indication, they will end up with neither.

Communists are fond of saying that "real" communism has never been tried. But that's not true, it has been tried, many times, and every time it's killed a lot of people. That kind of control goes against human nature, and the only way to enforce it is to kill lots of people. If we don't learn that lesson from history, we may be destined to continue repeating it. There may be different "flavors" of capitalism and socialism. But there is only one flavor of communism, and it's always deadly.

Perhaps we are destined for some flavor of socialism to dominate the Brave New Word our future is becoming. I can only say, it's a slippery slope. Perhaps it can be managed, but it would mean being forever vigilant of the dangers. Are we, the human race, up for it? Time will tell.



     

"The Clintons are counting on America to digest their ethical lapses the way a python swallows a goat" Will we?

Hillary’s Cynical Song of Self

Recently I wrote a column about Hillary Clinton’s method of lying: bald deceit sold to liberals with a wink-and-nod as the price of advancing a progressive agenda in this bigoted country of ours. Several readers wrote me to object that the mendacity I ascribed to Mrs. Clinton applied equally to Republicans.

Maybe. But what was striking about these critics is that none of them bothered to rebut the point that Mrs. Clinton is a habitual liar who treats truthfulness in politics the way a calorie-counting diner might treat hollandaise sauce on steak: to be kept strictly on the side or dribbled on in measured doses. Her lying has become as much a given in the liberal mind as Bill Clinton’s womanizing: He does his thing, she does hers.

Get over it.

All of which means that Mrs. Clinton’s presidential bid is an exercise in—and a referendum on—cynicism, partly hers but mainly ours. Democrats who nominate Mrs. Clinton will transform their party into the party of cynics; an America that elects Mrs. Clinton as its president will do so as a nation of cynics. Is that how we see, or what we want for, ourselves?

This is what the 2016 election is about. You know already that if Mrs. Clinton runs for president as an Elizabeth Warren-style populist she won’t mean a word of it, any more than she would mean it if she ran as a ’90s-style New Democrat or a ’70s-style social reformer. The real Hillary, we are asked to believe, is large and contains multitudes.

In other words, she’s singing a Song of Herself. She will say, do, and be pretty much anything to get elected. And the rest of us are supposed to fall in line because we prefer our politics to be transactional not principled, our politicians to be opportunists not idealists, and our national creed to be “do what you gotta do” not “upon this rock.” This is what might be called the Clinton Bargain: You can always count on their self-interest trumping other considerations, so you never have to fear that they can’t be bought.

The only question is who is doing the buying.

In recent days we’ve begun to learn some of their names: [...]

Hillary doesn't have to appear perfect to win; she only has to appear to be less-bad than any Republican candidate she runs against. And with the media on her side, she just might pull it off.

The article goes on to postulate the reasons why. And one or two why-nots. The author thinks Hillary can be beat. Ida know. I won't hold my breath. Read the whole thing, and see what you think.


Also see: Clinton's email spin-control, and the questions that nobody is asking

     

People who say they "Don't care about money"

A recent example is the Clinton's daughter:

Chelsea Clinton: I tried to care about money but couldn't

The daughter of former President Bill Clinton and ex-secretary of state Hillary Clinton explained in a recent interview why she left lucrative professions and opted for working with her family’s philanthropic foundation. ‘I was curious if I could care about (money) on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t,’ she said.

[...]

Comparing her experience to the average millennial, the 34-year-old former first daughter defended jumping around to different careers — from consulting to a hedge fund to academia to journalism — before finding her true calling working with her parents.

“It is frustrating, because who wants to grow up and follow their parents? I’ve tried really hard to care about things that were very different from my parents … it’s a funny thing to realize I feel called to this work, both as a daughter and also as someone who believes I have contributions to make,” she continued about her reluctant status as a boomerang kid.

The Clinton name likely opened doors for the political heiress, including an eye-popping $600,000 annual salary for an irregular stint as an NBC special correspondent, but Chelsea insists her work speaks for itself.

“I will just always work harder (than anybody else) and hopefully perform better,” said Clinton, who along with former banker husband Marc Mezvinsky, purchased a $10.5-million Gramercy Park apartment in 2013. [...]

Didn't her parents spend $3,000,000 on her wedding? I wouldn't be surprised if she has a trust fund, too. I doubt she ever has to worry about becoming homeless.

Given that she has more than enough to live comfortably, perhaps what she means is, she doesn't wish to work hard trying to earn more, because she already has enough? That she doesn't care about striving for more cash?

That would be understandable. But it's not quite the same as not caring about money. It's not like she's giving it all away, and becoming a renunciant with a begging bowl or anything. In fact, I find that people in her income class usually do care, and take steps to hang on to their money. Her parents have:

Wealthy Clintons use trusts to avoid full estate tax they back

Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton have long supported an estate tax to prevent the United States from being dominated by inherited wealth. That doesn't mean they want to pay it.

To reduce the tax pinch, the Clintons are using financial planning strategies befitting the top 1 percent of U.S. households in wealth. These moves, common among multimillionaires, will help shield some of their estate from the tax that now tops out at 40 percent of assets upon death.

The Clintons created residence trusts in 2010 and shifted ownership of their New York house into them in 2011, according to federal financial disclosures and property records.

Among the tax advantages of such trusts is that any appreciation in the house's value can happen outside their taxable estate. The move could save the Clintons hundreds of thousands of dollars in estate taxes, said David Scott Sloan, a partner at Holland & Knight L.L.P. in Boston.

"The goal is really be thoughtful and try to build up the nontaxable estate, and that's really what this is," Sloan said. "You're creating things that are going to be on the nontaxable side of the balance sheet when they die." [...]

All this posturing about not caring about money is easy when you have more than you could ever need, but IMO it rings hollow to someone whose annual income is only $11,000 a year. At that level, you HAVE TO CARE, and you know it, if you are reasonably smart and don't wish to be living in the streets.

I'm not envious of people for having wealth; who doesn't want to be better off than they are? That is perfectly natural, and I'm glad for people who manage to do it, because I want to be better off too. But it does grate when those who have so much more talk about being "broke" when they never were, like Hillary does, or not caring about money, like her daughter. Couldn't they be more honest? And shouldn't we insist that they are? Especially if they involve themselves in making laws about what is to be done with OUR money?

   

Why the Democrats are holding out

They feel they have little to lose. Here is one explanation:

Obama’s “small deal” could lead to bigger tax increases

[...] The Senate already passed a bill letting the Bush tax cuts lapse for income over $250,000. That bill is very, very popular. The White House expects that if we go over the cliff, the House will have to pass that bill, too, and the president would have little choice but to sign it. That bill raises taxes by a bit more than $700 billion, which is less than the $1.6 trillion the White House wants. But that $700 billion, to the White House, is the baseline: If they get nothing else, they will certainly get that.

And that’s why Boehner’s offer of $800 billion doesn’t impress. The White House already has some $700 billion in the bank, as they see it. The reason to negotiate with Boehner is that an agreement with him could, in theory, push that number well above $1 trillion while stabilizing the debt and avoiding the economic pain of falling off the fiscal cliff. But there’s no reason to cut a deal with Boehner in which the White House gives up spending cuts in order to get a tax increase they can have anyway.

The talk in Washington now is about a “small deal.” That would likely include the Senate tax bill, some policy to turn off at least the defense side of the sequester and a handful of other policies to blunt or delay various parts of the fiscal cliff.

That’s not a very good deal for the short-term health of the economy. Depending on how much of the fiscal cliff gets delayed, we could tip into recession anyway. But it could lead, in the end, to much more revenue than a “big deal” now.

Here’s how it would go. Some time in the next month or so, the small deal would pass and the White House would pocket that $700-plus billion in tax revenue. They really would get that for free, just as the president told Boehner.

But pressure would quickly mount to strike a larger deal, both because there would be another fiscal cliff coming and because the debt ceiling would need to be raised. (The White House swears they won’t negotiate over the debt ceiling, but it’s not exactly clear what that will mean in practice.)

The White House would insist that the next deal includes a 1:1 ratio of tax increases — all of which could come through Republican-friendly tax reform — to spending cuts. So a subsequent deal that included $600 billion or $700 billion in spending cuts would also include $600 billion or $700 billion in tax increases, leading to total new revenue in the range of $1.2 trillion to $1.4 trillion.

[...]

All of which is to say, if Boehner had taken the White House’s deal in 2011, he could’ve stopped the tax increase at $800 billion. If he took their most recent deal, he could stop it at $1.2 trillion. But if he insists on adding another round to the negotiations — one that will likely come after the White House pockets $700 billion in tax increases — then any deal in which gets the entitlement cuts he wants is going to mean a deal in which he accepts even more tax increases than the White House is currently demanding. [...]

Is this a bit simplistic? It's not up to Boehner alone to accept or not accept a deal. He has the rest of the Republican Party to contend with.

But if this turns out to be mostly true, then it doesn't look like it will got to well for the Republicans.
     

About the 3,000,000 Republicans who didn't vote, and other reasons why the GOP lost

How Republicans Can Rebrand

While listening to conservative pundits lamenting Mitt Romney's defeat, incredulous that three million Republicans didn't vote -- ostensibly because the GOP (Grand Old Party) had failed to get out the vote -- the real problem hit me: cultural infantilism. Liberalism, and its pillars entitlement and dependency, is now so pervasive, corrosive, and infectious that many of America's adults have regressed.

The GOP shouldn't have to "get out the vote" in any election. Responsible adults know that voting is a civic duty, a responsibility, an obligation, a self-directed act. We tell children to fulfill their obligations, right? Barack Obama exhorted his sycophantic base to vote, even instructing them that voting is the best revenge. Although he won, Obama received 10 million fewer votes in 2012 than he did in 2008.

Adults, conversely, get themselves out to vote. They take responsibility for their lives, make difficult choices and sacrifices, fight to limit government, and control their own destinies. Adults respect the laws of finance and accounting, resent wealth confiscation and redistribution, and loathe unpayable debt.

Alas, there are few adults in socialistic America; that's why Barack Obama, the Candy Man, appeals so much to Candylanders, who childishly accept free candy in exchange for their own freedom. President Obama understands the infantilism of his base and, accordingly, crafted a simple re-election strategy: promise and deliver them free candy; they will overlook my failures and vote for me with messianic zeal. It worked. [...]

That's one way of looking at it. I understand the rest of the author's rant, and as much as I sympathize with his proposed solutions, I'm not sure it's that simple, or that his proposed solutions alone would be effective enough. I think there is more that needs to be considered.

This also makes a lot of sense to me:

Republicans learn the hard way: George W. Bush was right

[...] Compassionate conservatism always struck me as a philosophical surrender to liberal assumptions about the role of the government in our lives. A hallmark of Great Society liberalism is the idea that an individual's worth as a human being is correlated to his support for massive expansions of the entitlement state. Conservatives are not uncompassionate. (Indeed, the data show that conservatives are more charitable with their own money and more generous with their time than liberals). But, barring something like a natural disaster, they believe that government is not the best and certainly not the first resort for acting on one's compassion.

I still believe all of that, probably even more than I did when Mr. Bush was in office.

But, as a political matter, it has become clear that he was on to something important.

Neither critics nor supporters of compassionate conservatism could come to a consensus over the question of whether it was a mushy-gushy marketing slogan (a Republican version of Bill Clinton's feel-your-pain liberalism) or a serious philosophical argument for a kind of Tory altruism, albeit with an evangelical idiom and a Texan accent.

Some sophisticated analysts, such as my National Review colleague Ramesh Ponnuru, always acknowledged the philosophical shortcomings and inconsistencies of compassionate conservatism, but argued that something like it was necessary nonetheless. The evolving demographics of the country, combined with the profound changes to both the culture and the economy, demanded the GOP change both its sales pitch and its governing philosophy. [...]

The playing field has changed. There are new demographics at work. The GOP needs to stop acting as if it's still the 1980s, if it wants to remain relevant.

And this too:

The real reason Obama won
History, not an imagined rejection of capitalism, explains the president's re-election victory

[...] In 1992, George H.W. Bush, presiding over a sluggish economy, faced the hard-charging Bill Clinton, who promised fundamental changes in the nation's economy and an alteration of priorities. Mr. Clinton's charisma and message that he represented change, coupled with a third-party candidacy in the person of Ross Perot, helped ensure Mr. Bush's defeat.

This year, Mitt Romney talked about change but failed to offer a clear agenda that represented a recognizable break with the past. Most informed voters surely recognized that they had heard the promised magical benefits of tax cuts before. In fact, the policy was very recently in place during the administration of George W. Bush, and helped turn a $290 billion budget surplus into a $455 billion deficit, while nearly doubling the national debt from $5.6 trillion to more than $10 trillion. Mr. Romney's assertions that he would reduce spending and close tax loopholes (without meaningful specifics), along with promised defense increases, prevented his ever gaining the credible high ground in the economic conversation. Bill Clinton's retort that "it's arithmetic" probably rang truer with voters than anything offered by the billions of dollars spent on political advertising.

While this year presented an economy still in slow recovery from its 2008 collapse, the other factors present in past presidential defeats were clearly lacking. President Barack Obama had no primary challenge, nor was there any thorny third-party candidacy. He was spared blame for the economic collapse, while being able to take credit for slow but undeniable growth. No charismatic personality dominated the agenda, and the challenger never offered an inspirational program of truly new ideas that signaled a compelling reason for change.

These facts, more than any theories about the rise to prominence of some entitlement-dependent mass bent on turning America into Europe, provide the basis for why the country decided to stay with the guy in office.

Read the whole thing. I think it's possibly the most objective and fair explanation I've read so far, based on historical comparison and analysis, of why the GOP didn't defeat the incumbent. All things considered, the outcome was inevitable.

It's not the end of the world, IF the GOP learns from it's mistakes. And as the next article I'm linking to points out, the Democrats would do well to not become over confident:

Don’t get cocky, Democrats: The post-Romney GOP looks just like you did two decades ago

You’re looking at a political party that has lost the popular vote in five of the past six elections; whose one winning presidential candidate achieved the White House thanks to a fluke; and whose prospects for the future seem doomed by demography and geography.

No, it’s not today’s Republican Party you’re looking at—it’s the Democratic Party after the 1988 elections. And the past (nearly) quarter-century is an object lesson in the peril of long-term assumptions about the nature and direction of our political path.

Consider where the Democrats found themselves that November. They had just lost their third straight presidential election, and not to the formidable Ronald Reagan, but to George Herbert Walker Bush, a WASP aristocrat prone to sitting down at a diner and asking for “a splash of coffee.” They’d lost by more than seven points in the popular vote, and by 416-111 in the Electoral College, winning only 10 states.

The most enduring element of their geographic base had vanished. The once-solid Democratic South was now solidly Republican and, for the second straight election, their candidate had not won a single state in the region.

But that was only the start of the wretched geographic picture. Four of the six New England states had gone Republican, and the Plains and the Mountain West were all in the GOP camp. Most daunting, three big states—New Jersey, Illinois and California, with 87 combined electoral votes—had gone Republican for the sixth consecutive election. The weakness of Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis could not explain away a recent political fact: The Republican Party appeared to have “an electoral lock” on the White House.

What had happened to the Democrats? What changed? And why is this relevant to Republican woes today? [...]

Read the whole thing, for a good reminder of how things can change.      

Do American's really want a One Party State?

"One party RULE?" File this under "WTF?":

Americans' Preference Shifts Toward One-Party Government
Change in preferences driven mostly by Democrats

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A record-high 38% of Americans prefer that the same party control the presidency and Congress, while a record-low 23% say it would be better if the president and Congress were from different parties and 33% say it doesn't make any difference. While Americans tend to lean toward one-party government over divided government in presidential election years, this year finds the biggest gap in preferences for the former over the latter and is a major shift in views from one year ago.

These findings are based on Gallup's annual Governance survey, conducted Sept. 6-9. The data show an increased level of support for one-party rule amid a currently divided government in which the Democrats control the presidency and the Senate, while the Republicans control the House. This suggests many Americans are experiencing divided-government fatigue.

Opinions on divided government have fluctuated over the years. When one party controlled both Congress and the presidency in 2006 and 2010, Gallup found near-historical lows supporting one-party rule. This suggests Americans may simply tend to prefer what they don't have or see problems in whatever the current situation is. At least one chamber of Congress changed hands in the subsequent elections, and the increase in support for one-party government in 2008 foreshadowed an election that would give the Democrats sole control of the presidency and both houses of Congress.

Just once, in 2005, have a plurality of Americans preferred divided government since Gallup began asking this question, indicating division at the federal level is rarely popular. The "makes no difference" response has generally been the most popular, though support for it fell this year to tie the lowest level Gallup has found. [...]

Ok, so its talking about One Party dominating government, not a one-party state. In theory, that at least leaves the door open for a change in government. BUT. For many years, I've heard many Democrats complain, that they hate our two party system of government. I've heard them say that they feel we really need only one party in the USA, and that to make any progress politically, the Republican party needs to be destroyed/disbanded. Or at least marginalized to the point where they have no power, and are merely "window dressing" for the pretense of a multiparty state.

Excuse me. There is a word for that. It's called "Fascism". And I'm afraid the Democrats have been flirting with fascism for a long while now, which is one reason why I stopped being a Democrat years ago.

This article by Gallop goes on to explain in detail how this "One Party" trend is being driven mostly by Democrats.  No surprise there.

Combine that, with our current Democrat Administration's penchant for quietly dismantling America, and what do we end up with? What will we end up with, if this Administration get's four more years, years where they will not have to worry about another election, and can just push 100% for what they want?

I don't like the Democrats. But I believe both the Democrats and the Republicans benefit by having a strong political opposition opposing them. It makes them both shape-up, try harder, and makes an incentive to strive to reach for bi-partisan legislation and solutions. When one party dominates too much, we end up with extremes, and the worst aspects of the dominating party. IMO, that is what we have seen in the past.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. We need BALANCE.


   

Would we be better off with a CEO president, instead of an ideological one?

If so, Mitt might well be the man for the job:

Mitt Romney is not a flip-flopper

[...] Is Romney truly a man "without a core"? The simple answer: No. Romney has a distinct core -- not that of a politician, but of a CEO.

What do I mean? We have become accustomed in these highly partisan times to politicians who adhere rigidly to their ideological positions. They don't change their views to attract supporters. Rather, they want voters to agree with the positions they advocate.

In contrast, a CEO is not shackled by ideology. A CEO's success is measured by the bottom line, not by how many principles he or she sticks to.

To the CEO, if a product is not selling, you don't stick with it until the product destroys your business. Instead, you tweak it. You rebrand it. You try a new slogan or new packaging. And if people are still not buying it, like New Coke, you drop it. You regroup, come up with a new product and then start selling again.

Romney is first and foremost a businessman. In fact, Romney has repeatedly made this very point to us with statements like: "I spent my life in the private sector, not in government. I only spent four years as a governor. I didn't inhale. I'm a business guy."

I'm not defending Romney's acrobatic flips on issues. In fact, if Romney loses this election, he would make a great circus performer. I can see the ads: "The Amazing Romney -- he can change positions in midair." At times, I truly wonder if Mitt realizes we have Google and can look up his record on issues.

But Romney's "evolution" on certain key issues does not technically constitute a "flip-flop," which is defined by Dictionary.com as, "A sudden or unexpected reversal as of direction, belief, attitude or policy."

Romney's changing views are neither sudden nor unexpected. Rather, they are astutely calculated by Romney the businessman to appeal to the customers he's targeting at that very moment. This is a man clearly driven by the adage: "The customer is always right." [...]

If that is true, then with Romney, we could end up with a non-ideological president who will simply work to give us what the majority of Americans want.

The majority of Americans are registered as "independant", and are not rigidly ideological. They are the swing voters that decide elections. A CEO president might suit THEM fine.

But Romney would have to overcome massive media bias against him, and the mistrust by the more ideological conservatives in his own party, who fear he is just like this article describes him.

As for me, well. The president we have now, said he was going to halve the deficit in his first term. Instead, he's tripled it.

He promised more transparency. Instead we got "We have to pass the bill before you can see what's in it."

He said my health care would not change as a consequence. I got a letter from my insurer, explaining that the sharp increase in rates was due to Obama care. It did indeed change.

I could go on and on, but the fact is, I stopped being a Democrat years ago, because I stopped believing what they were saying; they say ANYTHING to get elected, then they do whatever they want when they get power. I don't believe that the Democrat leadership says what they mean, or mean what they say.

Would a CEO president like Mitt Romney be better? I can't say for sure. But I can say that I'd rather take my chances with the CEO, than four more years of what we've had.
     

Jesus saves... the economy?

Yep. It's the DEMOGRAHICS that count. Here's an article that spells it out:

How will babies named Jesus save the economy?

[...] The currency of the future is babies, because babies grow up to be taxpaying workers. Let's do Demography 101, which is basically the study of baby-making. Demographers have a fancy term called "total fertility rate," which measures the average number of babies a woman has over her childbearing years.

The magic number you need to remember is 2.1. This is the average number of babies a country needs to remain at equilibrium. It makes sense, too. When a mother and father die, they need to be replaced by two babies, or else the population declines. A rich powerful country needs lots of babies to project geopolitical power and increase its productivity. If you won't multiply, who will fight your wars? Who will pay Social Security to support grandpa? Who do you think will start the next Facebook, Amazon or Google?

The U.S. total fertility rate is at 2.09, and at that level we just replace our population. That's not good. But wait a minute, why do we keep growing? Simple: immigration.

Our favorable immigration policy and liberal treatment of the millions of people working without legal documents means our population will grow from 312 million today to 439 million in 2050. Hispanic babies, 83 million of them, will account for 65% of that growth. This is where the total fertility rate comes into play again, 2.84 for Hispanics, but only 1.84 and trending much lower for non-Hispanic whites who will only add 4 million babies to the melting pot. Keep in mind that those Hispanic babies born here to Mitt Romney's "self-deportation" candidates are all red-blooded American citizens -- our future Navy SEALs, entrepreneurs, middle-class working Americans and maybe even a president.

Demography will shape the geopolitics of the two largest economies of the 21st century: the United States and the European Union. They will maintain their status as world powers principally through immigration. [...]

And the demographics don't only apply to economics, but to politics and elections as well. The demographics of the electorate is changing. Any political party that wants to remain relevant needs to recognize that.
     

So what is holding up Congress?

The media sides with the president and says it's the Republican's "playing politics". But in truth, there is plenty of politics on both sides of the Isle:

Obama on payroll tax cut: "Enough is enough"

President Obama on Thursday continued his campaign on behalf of a short-term extension of the payroll tax cut, blasting House Republicans for holding up a Senate-passed bill and wondering, "Has this place become so dysfunctional that even when people agree to things we can't do it?"

"It doesn't make any sense," he told reporters in a press conference. "Enough is enough."

[...]

Mr. Obama, in his remarks, called on Republicans to get this done "sooner rather than later."

"This should not be hard," he said. "We all agree it should happen. I believe it's going to happen sooner or later. Why not make it sooner rather than later? [...]

This article just quotes Obama tut-tuting about the Republicans like an Old School Marm complaining about a naughty child. All too typical rubbishy reporting, that mostly just parrots what Obama says. Anyone would think this is happening for no-reason at all.

This next article looks a bit deeper, and at least attempts to anwswer Obama's rhetorical question, "Why not make it sooner rather than later?":

Understanding Congress' payroll tax cut fight

WASHINGTON (AP) — If President Barack Obama, the House and the Senate all want to extend a Social Security payroll tax cut and jobless benefits through next year, why are they fighting so bitterly over doing it?

Obama, House Democrats and lopsided majorities of both parties in the Senate want to immediately renew the tax cut and jobless benefits for the next two months, and find a way later to extend them through 2012. House Republicans want to do it for a full year right away.

That doesn't sound like an unbridgeable gap. Yet the fight has evolved into a year-end partisan grudge match with no clear resolution in sight and with huge political and economic stakes.

[...]

Q: While they work through these differences, why the fuss over whether Congress first approves a two-month or a one-year plan?

A: For one thing, many freshman and conservative House Republicans are tired of compromising with the Senate and want their leaders to take a stand. They also say a two-month extension of the payroll tax cut would create uncertainty for taxpayers and businesses and problems for employers' payroll systems.

Many House Republicans hate the idea of keeping the issue alive until March 1, when the two-month bill would expire. Democrats have damaged Republicans politically with proposals to pay for the payroll tax cut by boosting levies on the rich. GOP lawmakers solidly oppose that approach, saying it would discourage job creation, and Democrats have used that to argue that Republicans are defending the wealthy at the expense of the middle class.

That's not an argument Republicans want to spend the 2012 election year having. As a result, many want to avoid additional votes on the matter next year, and they don't want to let Obama spend next month's State of the Union address discussing it. They would rather spend 2012 voting on issues they feel are on their terrain, like blocking Obama administration regulations, reducing the size of government and cutting its spending.

Q: What about Democrats?

A: They say the tax cut and unemployment coverage must be renewed to protect the millions who would be hurt Jan. 1. They also have no desire to surrender leverage by abandoning the two-month deal negotiated by the Senate's Reid and McConnell.

But they, too, have political motivations.

Democrats cite economists who say the payroll tax would pump enough money into the economy to help it grow slightly next year. Knowing that the 2012 presidential and congressional races are likely to hinge on the economy's performance, they want to take no chances with anything that might tip the economy in the wrong direction. To them, that means the payroll tax cut and extra jobless coverage must be extended. [...]

There are more Questions with Answers within the article that explain things. But for most people, this will be "sound bites" portraying the Republicans as obstructionists. The Republicans had better learn to deal with it. Quickly.
     

Favorite TV shows of the Left and Right

What does it mean? You decide:

Leftists like TV "shows about damaged people"
Follow the link for a list of the favorite shows of both Republicans and Democrats.
     

Not a pro-Republican day, but anti-Democrat

TURNING TO THE REPUBLICANS ?????

You may be asking yourself, considering the current conservative momentum, who do the Democrats still have left? This won't surprise you at all, but Pew research polling shows that Democrats hold substantial leads only among blacks, younger voters, those with low family incomes, union households and the religiously unaffiliated. Although other polls show that low-income Americans have actually turning toward the Republicans along with undecided women who are now turning to the GOP for the first time since 1982. Could it possibly be that women are thinking about surrendering security for opportunity?

Some are asking [what] made it OK for Americans to seriously consider the GOP again? Not so fast. As I've said just a few times before ... these people going to the polls today aren't engaging in this exercise to vote for Republicans. They're voting against Democrats. This election is one of the biggest political repudiations of all time. It truly is a revolution .. a revolution against big government. And this revolution was not led by the Republican Party. It was led by loosely organized groups of Americans who finally tired of arrogant government and politicians, high taxes and the diminishment of the country they love. These are people who were repulsed by a president who said that America is no more special than "Greece, England or any other country." These people shouted back "The hell it isn't!" and went to work.

Do you know what the biggest fear will be for Republican politicians as they convene the 112th Congress? The very same Tea Partiers who are in the process of feeding the Democrat congress into the political shredder today. Bob Beckel said it well on Fox & Friends this morning. This is not a Republican Day. This is an anti-Democrat day. Republicans need to remember that.

It was the Tea Partiers that forced the GOP to focus on spending, the economy and jobs and has therefore put its vote-killing social agenda on hold. But remember that the elections today are not a mandate for the Republican agenda, they are a house cleaning for the current bums in Washington. If the GOP believes today's elections to be some sort of mandate of their social agenda, they will completely lose all gains that they have made and you will absolutely see the emergence of a new majority party in the United States. Unless the GOP wants to personally experience impotence, it would be wise to leave all bedroom talk behind.

I couldn't agree more. Follow the link to the original if you want to see the embedded links.


Also see:

Why you should vote for Republicans
     

Your choice in November: the lesser of two evils

Moving Obama's Agenda Forward

[...] Obama said, "My name may not be on the ballot, but our agenda for moving forward is on the ballot, and I need everybody to turn out." Don't ya just love that phrase .. "our agenda of moving forward." Moving forward to what? If you're rushing toward the end of the pier, maybe changing your direction would be worth some consideration. Voters seem to think so.

Again ... moving forward to what?

Moving forward to unprecedented federal debt. From the time the gavel fell opening the first session of the first congress of the United States .. way back yonder in the late 1780s, until 1990 --- that's about 210 years - our country amassed $3 trillion in debt. Barack Obama amassed $3 trillion in additional debt in the first 17 months of his presidency. Moving forward.

When Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House on January 4, 2007 she announced that there would be no more deficit spending. None. Nada. Nunca. Since that time she has presided over a House of Representatives that has increased our deficit spending by another $5 trillion dollars. Moving forward.

When ObamaCare was passed The Community Organizer told us that we would be able to keep our insurance if we liked it. We can't. He told us it would cut the deficit. The Congressional Budget Office now says it won't. He told us it would cost less than one trillion dollars. It will cost more.

It takes 150,000 new jobs every single month in our country just to keep up with the rate of population growth. Obama hasn't seen that figure one single time since he was sworn in. Moving forward.

Out of every dollar our country spends today over 40 cents is borrowed. Moving forward.

America has been in recessions before. Never, though, has American seen a recession end with so few new private sector and so many government jobs being created. Moving forward.

At the rate that Obama is moving our country, we are moving right into bankruptcy. We are moving right into a period of unprecedented joblessness and growth of the moocher class. Moving forward implies becoming a better version of oneself. Obama is not taking our country in a direction of self idealization but off the cliff of self destruction.

Remember all the promises of bipartisanship? How has that worked out over the past two years? What actually happened? A look at the facts:

SO MUCH FOR THE BIPARTISAN PRESIDENT

[...] Which Obama are we going to get?

The answer: Probably the same one we've already seen. The same president that treated bipartisanship as nothing but smoke and mirrors. While holding a few meetings here and there, even a summit on healthcare, Republicans have been blocked from virtually everything the Democrats have done over the last two years. The great and wonderful stimulus package was crafted without a single Republican in the room. In fact, House Democrats shut Republicans out of offering floor amendments to all spending legislation. The recent small business package? Republicans were shut out of offering any amendments. Healthcare? Same exact thing. The Democrats, including Barack Obama, cannot claim bipartisanship and then completely shut out the other side. How many times did Obama react to an effort from Republicans to present ideas by saying "Hey ... I won!" Now with the Republicans coming into their own and gaining power in Congress, it will be interesting to see what Obama does when he doesn't have Nancy Pelosi and maybe even Harry Reid there as his first line of defense.

The Republicans have certainly played their own part in reckless spending. I think it's a big reason they lost in 2008, but the current Democrat administration have continued that policy with a vengeance. So the Republicans stand to make gains again, but it had better be different this time:

NO TIME TO PARTY

At least the Republicans seem to be embracing the fact that people are not going to the polls because they are in love with Republicans. That's a good thing. Republicans are realizing that they have a lot of work to do in order to get our country back on track and prove to those voters why they made the right decision on November 2nd.

On the night of the elections, John Boehner has made it clear that he does not consider November 2nd a time to party. He wants America to see that the Republicans are serious about tackling the problems we face. NRCC Communications Director Ken Spain says, "... even if voters remove Democrats from power, you don't celebrate at a time when one in 10 Americans are out of work and our children's future is threatened by mountains of debt."

They are right. Let's hope that they maintain this attitude for the next two years. And beyond. Things have this nasty little tendency to change when they get to Washington, pick out their drapes, their fresh flowers for their Congressional offices, and sink into the chair of power.

This time, the people will hold their feet to the fire.

Government will never be perfect. The founder's called it "A necessary evil" for a reason. The best way to limit government's potential for evil, is to limit the power of government itself. At the very least, those who are drunk with government power are overdue for a restraining order.

Is the Global Financial Crisis the beginning of the "brave new world" of life in America?

The books on Amazon.com are often reviewed by customers who also know quite a bit about the topic a book is about. Reading the customer reviews can be a real education in of itself. There are a lot of books appearing about the financial crisis, and what it means.

Below is a link to one book I read about recently. The first link is to the book, with the publisher's description. The two links that follow are from customers who read the book, and then gave their opinion. I thought it made a pretty interesting read:

Aftershock: Protect Yourself and Profit in the Next Global Financial Meltdown

Product Description

A practical guide to preparing for the next phase of the financial meltdown

From the authors who were the first to predict Phase I of our current economic downturn-in their landmark 2006 book, America's Bubble Economy-comes their insightful sequel discussing their predictions for the next phase of the Bubble Economy.

It may seem like the worst has come and gone, but it hasn't. With their proven track record of accurate predictions-which most financial professionals and economists missed-the authors explain how and why the next phase of the financial meltdown is about to hit. Things are not going back to how they were before. Instead, we are moving through uncharted territory, with new challenges and opportunities that few people can anticipate. Written in a straightforward and accessible style, Aftershock shows readers how to seek safety and profits in these dynamic economic conditions.

* Discusses how to protect assets, businesses, and jobs before and during the second wave of financial meltdown

* Provides clear and accurate advice on how to profit from the collapsing bubbles

* Offer focused guidance regarding real estate, which will continue to be a pressing concern for many

The authors' first book was chosen by Kiplinger's as one of the 30 Best Business Books of 2006, and its accuracy has been hailed by Paul Farrell of Dow Jones MarketWatch when he said "America's Bubble Economy's Predictions, though ignored, were accurate." Don't miss out on these time tested author's proven advice for how to mange your money during the coming financial meltdown.

Ok, so that's how it's being presented. Now here is a 5 star review from a customer:

"Don't Worry, Not a Single Penny of your Tax Dollars Will Fund the Bailouts."

"That's right. The bank and corporate bailout money is not coming from our taxes. Instead we're just borrowing it from foreign investors. We're also printing some of it...Of course, we will never, ever have to pay it all back, because even if we tried (and we won't), we never could."

That is why the U.S. Government will eventually be unable to borrow money and the nation will have to start living within it's means. That will be the beginning of the brave new world of life in America. This book is how we are speeding toward this "Bubblequake" and its "Aftershock." Although somewhat depressing (like all bad news is), this book also tells people what they can do to survive this worldwide depression and how to actually be able to make money during the painful readjustment of the world's economies. While this is a scary book because of what is happening all around us, it is also a hopeful book. The nation will survive after the country stops ignoring the basic laws of economics. The three authors are optimistic (maybe overly so) that the American people will be able to make the adjustments needed to achieve economic survival without having to become survivalists who have to grow their own food and defend their homes from roving mobs with guns. They feel that even dictators will be unable rise from the chaos because Americans will be changing its government officials as soon as it's obvious their policies don't work. There will be frequent changes in elected officials.

The nation will survive because basically the country is wealthy and will still be so after the economic bubbles have all popped and forced everyone and their government to live within their means.

These authors "are not bulls or bears or gold bugs, stock boosters or detractors, currency pushers, or doom-and-gloom crusaders," and "have no particular political ideology to endorse, and no dogmatic future to promote."

The goal of this book is "to tell you more details about the next round of bubbles to fall while there's still time to protect your assets and position yourself to survive and thrive in this dangerous, yet potentially highly profitable new environment...Although much of what we predicted in our first book that hasn't happened yet because most of the impact of the multi-bubble collapse is still to come. This is good news because it means you still have time to get prepared."

It's impossible to do justice to this book's message in a short review. The review copy I worked from is now practically destroyed by so many dog-eared pages and underline and highlighted passages. The three authors share a theory of the economy having being boosted by six economic co-linked bubbles. They are: The real estate bubble, the stock market bubble, the private debt bubble, the discretionary spending bubble, the dollar bubble and the government debt bubble. Four of those bubbles have already burst or are still in the process of collapsing. With the collapse of each bubble it puts more pressure on the remaining bubbles, and the two most important bubbles are in dire danger. The dollar bubble and government debt bubble collapses will change the face of America and the world. America will be bankrupt.

In their first book, "America's Bubble Economy" the authors accurately predicted the economic chaos of 2008 and 2009. This book picks up developments in 2010 and the following years and predicts the next economic bubbles that will pop. In the coming much worst economy, the book shows readers the best ways to protect, their jobs, businesses and assets. It explains how the housing crisis isn't "a sub prime mortgage problem whose contagion spread to other mortgages; it is a `housing price collapse.'" The number of home owners with mortgages that are underwater has risen from 14.3% in Q3 2008 to 33% in Q2 of 2009." Since 70% of the American Economy is based on consumer spending, the bubbles that have already popped or are still in the process of deflating won't be able to re-inflate. When the dollar loses it's value and the government can no longer pay its loans, and therefore won't be able to get any credit. America's golden age will be over.

Inflation, resorted to by the desperate government, will rack the nation bankrupting most businesses. "40 to 60%" unemployment may become the norm. There will be so many people seeking jobs that wages will tank. Everyone will be on Medicaid, not Medicare, and all the unemployed will be on welfare. The rich will have left the USA or be broke and all the government's taxes will come from the working people--the middle class. Since as much income as possible will be hidden, there will be national sales taxes and Value Added Taxes on every product or service. Family members will return home to live together with their extended families in order to control housing expenses.

After I finished this book I went home and made some of the changes suggested by this book. They include such obvious things as selling real estate if a buyer can be found and getting rid of variable rate mortgages if you can't sell the real estate. Variable rate mortgages are absolute poison. Selling off stocks is another suggestion. It doesn't have to be done all at once, it can be done over the next couple of years, but most stocks should be sold because the dollar bubble collapse will destroy stock market values. Collectables and art will be non-liquid and will drastically drop in value (90%) for the long term. Gold, and silver to a lesser extent, will retain its position as a hedge against inflation as well as a protection against the dollar bubble collapse. The authors also list the types of jobs that will be in demand during the coming perilous times. As one might expect some job categories will boom while the unnecessary ones will disappear. For example construction workers may want to start looking for jobs that repair existing structures rather than build new buildings. You'll have to read this book to get the answers to many of the questions that reading this volume will provoke.

The thing this reviewer liked the best about this book was the carefully explained logic of it's predictions. It provides a much better overview of the current economy. The readers will discover lots of new information that they've probably never heard or read before, but that the reader's gut instinct and personal experience will tell him or her is obviously true. While the authors may be wrong on some of their predictions, most of them will probably prove all too accurate. At the end of each chapter the authors list a website where more current information on that chapter's point can be gleaned before the next volume of this continuing series is published. This is a page turner, but it will be slow reading from the standpoint of having to constantly stop and make notes in the margin or pause to see how a particular point directly effects the reader's own situation. Reading this book will make you aware of economics like you've never previously been aware. Depending on your age, you may well recall your parents or grandparents advice that they'd learned during the Great Depression of 1929. The coming bubble bursts are going to be a more society-changing depression than the one 1929, although "few will suffer like they did in the Great Depression." The safety net will allow everyone to survive at a low standard of living. While the book didn't make this comparison, while reading it, I could easily visualize the United States as a colder, slightly wealthier version of Cuba. As I read it I also saw some visions of the movie "Dr. Zhivago" pop into my mind.

A "slightly wealthier version of Cuba"? Dr. Zhivago? UGH! Yet I have to wonder if there aren't some people in the current administration who would like to see exactly that. Their policies sure seem to be aiming for it.

Now for contrast, a one star review:

Interesting initial concept, but does not help investors

The book starts with the premise that there are six major "bubbles" that will combine to create great stress in the economy. OK, I'll buy that, but what I was looking for was helpful investing tactics to get through the bubble bursts ok. Written in mid 2009, the book failed miserably in providing tactical investment advice. For example:

o They suggest shorting the market with inverse ETFs. That strategy would have been a disaster in the year after March 2009 when the stock market soared.

o They write that the Euro community will be much more solid than the US dollar in the near term. Now we see the Euro in collapse with the US dollar doing fine.

Also, I find it extremely annoying that the authors constantly point to their previous book and say "We got those predictions right, so you should look carefully at what we have to say now." Such hubris usually leads to unfulfilled predictions.

Particularly with this constant pointing to their previous clairvoyance, I was really disappointed that there was nothing in this book (other than "buy gold"--surely not a new idea) that I found helpful in my investing tactics. I was disappointed in myself for wasting time reading most of the book.

The dollar may be doing better than the Euro at the moment, but I doubt that it's "doing fine". His comment about gold is no doubt true enough. I've found it a common criticism with these kinds of books, that they all say "buy gold", but don't offer much else in advice.

I'm going to end this with one more 5 star review, but THIS one goes into detail about some things he didn't like about the book:

In its field: Outstanding; Outside: Not so good

Although I don't particularly like the way this book is written and disagree with most of the irrelevant asides offered in support of the analyses: I find this to be the most complete and comprehensive analysis of America's ongoing economic problems that I have thus far encountered. In addition: the reasoned deductions which the authors draw from their analyses are far ranging and logical; and, for the most part, the conclusions which they reach are well justified and difficult to dispute. So, if you are looking for a book that will give you some valuable insight into what is happening to the U.S. economy today, and why; which explains how the ultimate collapse of that economy and the U.S. dollar will take place; and which forecasts what the United States and the world at large will be like following that calamity, then this is certainly a book which you should read.

I won't attempt to outline the book since other reviewers have probably done that already; and besides that might spoil the fun for you, the reader. But I would like to point out some of the seemingly gratuitous "asides" [not pertaining directly to the analyses] with which I disagree.

On page 170, the authors praise Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) for freeing the U.S. from the requirement to back its currency with gold, instead backing in by "the full faith and credit of the United States government." In my view, no praise is warranted, since FDR's actions helped set the U.S. on the path toward to its own economic destruction. Also on page 170, the authors state that in 1973 the United States went off the International Gold Standard [stopped redeeming foreign-held U.S. dollars for gold in accordance with the Bretton Woods Agreement signed in 1944] because that was the only way we could continue to buy foreign goods. In reality, the U.S. was forced to stop redeeming foreign-held dollars for gold because by 1973 we had inflated our currency to such an extent that France and Great Britain began to question the safety of our currency and there was a run on our gold reserves. On page 188, the authors once again praise FDR for crossing over political boundaries to push through his New Deal policies. It is fairly common knowledge nowadays, however, that FDR's policies helped propel what is thought to have been a probable recession into a thirteen year depression ended only by America's entry into World War II.

On page 195, the authors use the example of an independent physicist who, following the Challenger Accident in 1986, performed a simple experiment to show NASA why the accident occurred. In reality, Thiokol engineers pleaded with NASA not to launch STS-51L because the O-rings were colder than 53 degrees Fahrenheit. The decision to launch was made for political reasons not out of ignorance. On page 196, the authors praise the book "Silent Spring." That book, of course, misrepresented the science concerning DDT leading to its being banned and resulting in several million deaths worldwide due to malaria and other diseases. On page 200-201, the authors contend that gold is not a good store of value since its price fluctuates. In reality, the price of gold doesn't fluctuate. The price of various nation's currencies fluctuate relative to gold. To illustrate: The oil cartel members (OPEC) routinely adjust the price of oil, in terms of U.S. dollars, such that their return remains fairly constant in terms of gold. (Are they smarter than us, or what?) And, last but not least, on page 217, the authors praise Barack Obama for trying "to contain the growing blaze" [of uncontrolled government spending]. As we all know: Nothing could be farther from the truth.

But, one last thing: On page 187, the authors theorize that, at some far distant future date, some international assemblage will devise an international monetary system, independent of gold or any other metal, that "will be inflation-free because the system that controls the supply of IMUs [International Monetary Units] will be set up to avoid it." In all of man's history, gold is the only standard which has ever met that requirement! And human nature being what it is: How naïve can you get?

Regardless of all this: I can't help but offer my thanks and praise to the authors of this book for their in-depth assessment of America's troubles, particularly at this unique point in America's and the world's history. One can only hope that their work and this book will help bring more Americans to their senses and encourage them to take whatever steps they can to protect themselves and their families. Bottom line: This is a truly outstanding book in the field of economics, but outside that field, as demonstrated by the above noted "asides," it leaves much to be desired.

The interesting thing about customer reviews on Amazon.com, is that people can also leave comments on the reviews. Here is one comment on this last review:

Excellent review of this book. Glad to see someone else take issue with the authors' obsession with FDR, and their general economic illiteracy (even if their specific predictions concerning the economy are spot on). Also happy to see someone point out the obvious flaws in an international monetary system - after all, the whole point of an international monetary system is to increase the control a privileged elite have over spending power (the same function the Federal Reserve serves today). To assume that international currency would prevent economic depressions is naive indeed.

What I would like to add is that the authors mistakenly attribute the cause of the coming "aftershock" to Reagan's presidency in the 1980's. They attempt to paint the origin of our debt problem in his presidency, when in fact it stretches back to the president they so admire: FDR. Between FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society we are left with the real reasons for decreasing productivity growth: government healthcare, welfare programs and social security. By artificially limiting the number of people who need to work, and how long they need to work, the government has decreased the rate of productivity growth. Culturally other problems are also present (declining birth rates being one of them). So, instead of saying that the problem is merely the deficit, the authors should have focused on how government incentivized laziness through its welfare and social security programs.

Excellent! And the author of the review also gives an excellent reply to this comment. But I can't be printing it all here, so if you find it interesting, check it out. There are lots more reviews and comments.

As for the false premise that Reagan's presidency is the cause of the financial crisis, anyone believing that needs to disabuse themselves of that notion, with some facts:

Busting the Bank Deregulation Myth

If you want to look for root causes of our financial crisis, look to FDR, LBJ, and the “Reinvestment Acts" of three Democrat Presidents.

Some Republicans did their best to stop the damage before it reached critical mass, but they were stopped by Democrats:

Our Democrat-Created Crisis: They blocked a Reform bill co-sponsored by John McCain

The Republican's aren't without blame. We had 8 years of George W. Bush, and his spending like a Democrat, and keeping war debts off the national budget figures. I can make no excuses for it, because it is inexcusable. But two wrongs don't make a right, and now we have a Democrat Administration that seems intent on pushing us over the edge of the cliff, instead of guiding us away from it.

Where Republicans have erred, is in going along with the Democrats financial policies. And unfortunately, the Democrat's understanding of economics tends to be very poor. We are seeing the proof of that now.

But the voters choose the politicians, and the blame ultimately rests there. The electorate needs to make better choices. If these problems can be fixed, the voters may have their last chance to do so this November.


Also see:

Has US Currency already "collapsed"?

What would a U.S. currency collapse look like?

What happens when Tax Cuts Expire in 2011?

# Our true national debt: $130,000,000,000,000.

Argentina's Example: Are we heading there?