View Full Version : A Second American Revolution?
Thomas Paine
07-31-2010, 23:14
PERSPECTIVE
Will Washington's Failures Lead To Second American Revolution?
By ERNEST S. CHRISTIAN AND GARY A ROBBINS
07/30/2010
The Internet is a large-scale version of the "Committees of Correspondence" that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington's failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another.
People are asking, "Is the government doing us more harm than good? Should we change what it does and the way it does it?"
Pruning the power of government begins with the imperial presidency.
Too many overreaching laws give the president too much discretion to make too many open-ended rules controlling too many aspects of our lives. There's no end to the harm an out-of-control president can do.
Bill Clinton lowered the culture, moral tone and strength of the nation — and left America vulnerable to attack. When it came, George W. Bush stood up for America, albeit sometimes clumsily.
Barack Obama, however, has pulled off the ultimate switcheroo: He's diminishing America from within — so far, successfully.
He may soon bankrupt us and replace our big merit-based capitalist economy with a small government-directed one of his own design.
He is undermining our constitutional traditions: The rule of law and our Anglo-Saxon concepts of private property hang in the balance. Obama may be the most "consequential" president ever.
The Wall Street Journal's steadfast Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote that Barack Obama is "an alien in the White House."
His bullying and offenses against the economy and job creation are so outrageous that CEOs in the Business Roundtable finally mustered the courage to call him "anti-business." Veteran Democrat Sen. Max Baucus blurted out that Obama is engineering the biggest government-forced "redistribution of income" in history.
Fear and uncertainty stalk the land. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says America's financial future is "unusually uncertain."
A Wall Street "fear gauge" based on predicted market volatility is flashing long-term panic. New data on the federal budget confirm that record-setting deficits in the $1.4 trillion range are now endemic.
Obama is building an imperium of public debt and crushing taxes, contrary to George Washington's wise farewell admonition: "cherish public credit ... use it as sparingly as possible ... avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt ... bear in mind, that towards the payment of debts there must be Revenue, that to have Revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised, which are not ... inconvenient and unpleasant ... ."
Opinion polls suggest that in the November mid-term elections, voters will replace the present Democratic majority in Congress with opposition Republicans — but that will not necessarily stop Obama.
A President Obama intent on achieving his transformative goals despite the disagreement of the American people has powerful weapons within reach. In one hand, he will have a veto pen to stop a new Republican Congress from repealing ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank takeover of banks.
In the other, he will have a fistful of executive orders, regulations and Obama-made fiats that have the force of law.
Under ObamaCare, he can issue new rules and regulations so insidiously powerful in their effect that higher-priced, lower-quality and rationed health care will quickly become ingrained, leaving a permanent stain.
Under Dodd-Frank, he and his agents will control all credit and financial transactions, rewarding friends and punishing opponents, discriminating on the basis of race, gender and political affiliation. Credit and liquidity may be choked by bureaucracy and politics — and the economy will suffer.
He and the EPA may try to impose by "regulatory" fiats many parts of the cap-and-trade and other climate legislation that failed in the Congress.
And by executive orders and the in terrorem effect of an industrywide "boot on the neck" policy, he can continue to diminish energy production in the United States.
By the trick of letting current-law tax rates "expire," he can impose a $3.5 trillion 10-year tax increase that damages job-creating capital investment in an economy struggling to recover. And by failing to enforce the law and leaving America's borders open, he can continue to repopulate America with unfortunate illegals whose skill and education levels are low and whose political attitudes are often not congenial to American-style democracy.
A wounded rampaging president can do much damage — and, like Caesar, the evil he does will live long after he leaves office, whenever that may be.
The overgrown, un-pruned power of the presidency to reward, punish and intimidate may now be so overwhelming that his re-election in 2012 is already assured — Chicago-style.
• Christian, an attorney, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Ford administration.
• Robbins, an economist, served at the Treasury Department in the Reagan administration.
LINK:
www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/542171/201007301830/Will-Washingtons-Failures-Lead-To-Second-American-Revolution-.aspx
A wounded rampaging president can do much damage —
Obama will have a ‘scorched earth’ agenda in full force before he loses Congress :(
dr. mabuse
08-01-2010, 02:57
Can't recall a time ( in my lifetime ) when non-Conservative people are freely voicing harsh criticism as to what's going on in Washington.
Spoke with a wife of a black preacher from the less affluent side of Dallas 3 days ago and she was so fed-up with P'BO she couldn't even talk. Thought she was going to have a nosebleed.
November may be more interesting than usual this year. :munchin
dadof18x'er
08-01-2010, 05:14
Obama will have a ‘scorched earth’ agenda in full force before he loses Congress :(
I was hoping Rangel will have that attitude as he gets tossed under the bus.
Maybe he and Maxine Waters could provide some misery in the right places this fall :lifter
Maybe something to think about - e plurbus unum.
Richard :munchin
Americans Not The Individuals We Think We Are
Claude Fischer, DMN, 1 Jul 2010
Part 1 of 2
Americans like to see themselves as rugged individualists, a nation defined by the idea that people should set their own course through life. Think of Clint Eastwood rendering justice, rule-bound superiors be damned. Think of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.”
The idea that personal liberty defines America is deeply rooted and shared across the political spectrum. The lifestyle radicals of the ’60s saw themselves as heirs to this American tradition of self-expression; today, it energizes the tea party movement, marching to defend individual liberty from the smothering grasp of European-style collectivism.
But are Americans really so uniquely individualistic? Are we, for example, more committed individualists than people in those socialist-looking nations of Europe? The answer appears to be no.
For many years now, researchers worldwide have been conducting surveys to compare the values of people in different countries. And when it comes to questions about how much the respondents value the individual against the collective — that is, how much they give priority to individual interest over the demand of groups, or personal conscience over the orders of authority — Americans consistently answer in a way that favors the group over the individual. In fact, we are more likely to favor the group than Europeans are.
Surprising as it may sound, Americans are much more likely than Europeans to say that employees should follow a boss’s orders even if the boss is wrong, to say children “must” love their parents, and to believe that parents have a duty to sacrifice themselves for their children. We are more likely to defer to church leaders and to insist on abiding by the law. Though Americans do score high on a couple of aspects of individualism, especially where it concerns government intervening in the market, in general we are likelier than Europeans to believe that individuals should go along and get along.
American individualism is far more complex than our national myths, or the soap-box rhetoric of right and left, would have it. It is not individualism in the libertarian sense, the idea that the individual comes before any group and that personal freedom comes before any allegiance to authority. Research suggests that Americans do adhere to a particular strain of liberty — one that emerged in the New World — in which freedom to choose your allegiance is tempered by the expectation that you won’t stray from the values of the group you choose. In a political climate where “liberty” is frequently wielded as a rhetorical weapon but rarely discussed in a more serious way, grasping the limits of our notion of liberty might guide us to building America’s future on a different philosophical foundation.
The image of America as the bastion of libertarianism is a long-established one. Our Founding Fathers stipulated a set of personal rights and freedoms in our key documents that was, by the standards of that day, radical. The quintessentially American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Self-Reliance, extolled the person who does not defer to outside authority or compromise his principles for the sake of any collectivity — family, church, party, community or nation.
This quality in the American character struck observers from overseas, including Alexis de Tocqueville, who in his 1830s book, Democracy in America, famously tied the relatively new word “individualism” to what seemed so refreshingly new about the Americans. Popular culture today reinforces this image by making heroes of men (it’s almost always men) who put principle above everything else, even if — perhaps especially if — that makes them loners.
But in modern America, when you look at real issues where individual rights conflict with group interests, Americans don’t appear to see things this way at all. Over the last few decades, scholars around the world have collaborated to mount surveys of representative samples of people from different countries. The International Social Survey Program, or ISSP, and the World Value Surveys, or WVS, are probably the longest-running, most reliable such projects. Starting with just a handful of countries, both now pose the same questions to respondents from dozens of nations.
Their findings suggest that in several major areas, Americans are clearly less individualistic than Western Europeans. One topic pits individual conscience against the demands of the state. In 2006, the ISSP asked the question, “In general, would you say that people should obey the law without exception, or are there exceptional occasions on which people should follow their consciences even if it means breaking the law?” At 45 percent, Americans were the least likely out of nine nationalities to say that people should at least on occasion follow their consciences — far fewer than, for example, the Swedes (70 percent) and the French (78 percent). Similarly, in 2003, Americans turned out to be the most likely to embrace the statement “People should support their country even if the country is in the wrong.”
Such results contradict the message we send when we assign students the work of say, Henry David Thoreau, a follower of Emerson’s who wrote Civil Disobedience , or celebrate the bravery of Martin Luther King Jr . They contradict much of the justification for the Second Amendment, whose supporters see it as empowering the individual with a gun to say no to the state.
But what about more intimate arenas of life? In 1991, the ISSP asked respondents whether they agreed that “Right or wrong should be a matter of personal conscience.” Americans came in next to last of seven nationalities, with 47 percent agreeing, 1 point ahead of the Norwegians but almost 20 points behind the Dutch and more than 40 points behind the Austrians.
Americans are also unlikely to put individual happiness before the institution of marriage. They were second-most-likely (after the British) to agree that even a childless couple should “stay together even if they don’t get along.” (The Italians, overwhelmingly Catholic, were much more likely to support divorce in these circumstances.) And Americans were the least likely, in the 1998 ISSP, to accept the idea that it might be acceptable for “a married person [to have] sexual relations with someone other than his or her husband or wife.” (Coming in first were — no surprise — the French, 31 percent of whom endorsed this sort of individual liberty.)
The nature of individualism is complex, however, and there are at least a couple of ways that Americans in the ISSP and similar surveys do appear more individualistic than Europeans. For one, Americans are usually the most likely to say that individuals determine their own fates. What happens to you is your own doing, not the product of external circumstances. For Americans, things are the way they are because individuals made choices.
Also, the closer survey questions get to matters of economics and government, the clearer it is that Americans are strong believers in laissez-faire. Americans are much likelier than Europeans to reject government or workers interfering with owners’ authority to run their businesses. Americans are the most likely to choose freedom over equality, when equality is defined as a situation in which “nobody is underprivileged and … social class differences are not so strong.” Not surprisingly, Americans are the most hostile to having the government redress economic inequality.
Nonetheless, the libertarianism of Emerson does not characterize Americans’ broader understandings of the role of the individual in society. In fact, Americans seem much more willing to submerge personal liberty to the group than Europeans are.
Yet, the notions of individualism and liberty have lost none of their rhetorical power in today’s America. We clearly see ourselves as individualists, far more so than Europeans do. How do we explain this contradiction, between the celebration of America as the land of individual freedom and Americans’ actual tendency to favor the group?
The answer, I think, is that Americans have historically adhered to a distinctive view of the individual’s place in society, a view that can be called “communal voluntarism.”
Americans insist on the reality and value of individual free choice, including, critically, free choice to join or leave groups, be they companies or countries. However, Americans also believe that, once individuals are members of the group, they must be loyal. You could think of this philosophy as “love it or leave it” — with the understanding that you aren’t forced to join and are genuinely free to leave.
In the Old World, communities were more commonly imposed on individuals, and constraining. Traditionally, one was born into a clan, ethnicity, church, village or nation and pretty much locked into it. In the New World, with the noted exception of Indians and slaves, membership became a matter of free choice and voluntary commitment.
(cont'd)
Americans Not The Individuals We Think We Are
Claude Fischer, DMN, 1 Jul 2010
Part 2 of 2
Americans believe in contracts — or covenants, to use religious language. Our culture insists that if you marry, if you take a job, if you join a club, you are signing an explicit or implicit contract to cooperate and conform. If the group no longer works for you, the door is open. American-style individualism lies in the freedom to choose; American-style collectivism lies in the commitment to the group that freely choosing entails.
We can see this impulse, too, in the very earliest days of American settlement. In 1630, John Winthrop, who would be the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, addressed his shipmates sailing to the New World. They were a mix of Puritan refugees and those simply traveling to seek their fortunes. He urged each one to submit to the group: “We must be knit together in this work as one man. … We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes … our community as members of the same body.”
How un-Emersonian; how un-libertarian to urge such submission to the “body.” But how American. Winthrop’s plea underlines the choice; he is asking his listeners to voluntarily submit. The settlers simultaneously made the highly individualistic choice of leaving their old ties behind and the communal choice of binding themselves with others in a new community.
Communal voluntarism characterized the Protestant congregations that sprung up all over the United States in the late 18th and the 19th centuries. They provided the archetype of the American community — freely formed but highly absorbing. Americans are especially likely to switch denominations and churches but also to be religiously enthusiastic members of the ones they are in. Americans behave much the same with regard to neighborhoods, clubs, friendships and even marriages. Western Europeans’ connections to churches are almost a mirror image: born into a lifetime membership in a national religion, they are more often indifferent to religion.
There are several strands to what makes Americans a distinctive people. One strand is certainly the anti-government impulse, and one is the embrace in the 19th century of laissez-faire ideas. But another, perhaps greater, strand is the communalism that emphasizes making, in Winthrop’s terms, “others’ conditions our own.”
If we want to celebrate Americanism, we can emphasize dumping taxed tea off the ship — or we can, with even more justification, emphasize that we are all in this boat together.
Claude Fischer is author of the newly published “Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character.” This essay, which first appeared in the Boston Globe, is adapted from a post on the book’s blog, madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-fischer_04edi.fa57a749.html
Utah Bob
08-01-2010, 09:12
Thanks, Richard. Very interesting. I'll have to get a copy of Fischer's book.
It seems to me that we are at a time when roles have been reversed. Thinking back to the radicals of the 60s, when self expresionism was all the rage and the "radicals" spoke out against the government actions and intrusion. Now, some 40+ years later, the tea party movement and its members are the "radicals" and because the liberal left lacks any better term, "racists".
IMO, I think there are a lot more sheeple that have become disenfranchised with Barry but are too afraid to admit the grave mistake they made in swallowing his koolaid and voting him into office. I have met some that have hung their heads in shame and disgust and admitted their bad decision and regret. However, it is too late. I asked a couple of them, "well, what are you gonna do about it now? To rectify the problem". All I received was a shrug.
After reading the posting last nite by Thomas Paine, I thought long and hard of what it would mean if we had another revolution. Would it be a revolution or perhaps more of a civil war? We are a country divided, which is not healthy and even more so since we are fighting two wars. Even in my own family, I have become a pariah because of my political and religious views. Looking back at the American Revolutionary war and the Civil War, how many families were divided?
It's a shame that we have come to this. The writing was on the wall before the 2008 election and nobody stopped to read it. People were caught up in the "feel good" kumbyah campfire of the campaign. That election showed that we, as Americans, are not individualists but lemmings.
Thank you Thomas and Sir Richard for your excellent postings. It gives much food for thought.
Buffalobob
08-01-2010, 09:51
It is usually easy to tell when a writer decides that rhetoric is more important than facts and truth and when he has less ethics than the people he decides to attack. Classic example of unfounded rhetoric from which he decide to build his house of rhetoric
Bill Clinton lowered the culture, moral tone and strength of the nation — and left America vulnerable to attack. When it came, George W. Bush stood up for America, albeit sometimes clumsily.
Barack Obama, however, has pulled off the ultimate switcheroo: He's diminishing America from within — so far, successfully.
Once upon a time long ago there were two men of similar personal ethics who joined together in common cause. Their names were Richard Millhouse Nixon and Spiro T Agnew. Q.E.D.
If you follow the second train to thought concerning Americans to something we are all familiar with and that is special Forces then ask yourself does special forces fit the thoughts concerning communal collectivism. When you join an ODA are you asked to be an individual or are you required to conform and perform to the best interest of the ODA even when that might not be in your personal best interest. My experience is that a unit in combat is an extremely conformist group.
I remember "individuals" who would not conform during SFOC being reassigned out of SF. I remember one young 2Lt who was perhaps a little too individualistic on a training FTX barely surviving the wrath of the TAC (vote was 3-2 to keep me in). Go read the forum rules - conform or else is what they say - no revolution allowed is the basic tenant.
Very interesting posts.
Here is more opinion from the individualist camp:
Full article here:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/30/it-is-us/
Excerpt below:
NUGENT: It is us
We're the ones who allowed anti-Americans to take over America
By Ted Nugent
"Barack Hussein Obama did not sneak into power. An army of clueless, disconnected, ignorant Americans invited him to bring his Marxist, glaringly anti-American jihad into our lives. This president's overtly destructive, clear-and-present-danger agenda is surpassed in transparency only by his ultra-leftist public voting record and overall lifetime conduct of consorting with the enemy as a child and student of Marxism, socialist and racist community organizer, congregant of the blatant America-hating black-theology- and social-justice-spewing Rev. Jeremiah Wright and close personal friend of convicted communist terrorists like Bill Ayers, and by his unflinching appointment of an array of communist czars, including Van Jones, Cass Sunstein, Anita Dunne, et al. So let me get this straight: You claim your intentions were noble because you simply wanted to get your child a puppy but somehow didn't notice that it was foaming at the mouth, and now you're shocked that your child has rabies? I think not. That is not a mistake. It is negligence -- dangerous, life threatening and, I am convinced, downright criminal negligence.
And the price for such negligence is catastrophic, don't you know."
CloseDanger
08-01-2010, 15:30
How does the richest and most free people vote for a congress, senate, and presidential race to their own detriment unless they are either stupid or in on the take. Thats the question.
I swore an Oath. I plan to uphold that. Where are YOU?
Maybe it is better to put that chatter underground.
Count your muskets and sabers, and keep your powder dry Men. This thing is growing horns faster than we can see it coming.
GratefulCitizen
08-01-2010, 15:47
The federal government can pass whatever laws they want.
The revolution will be one where the people and states just ignore the next 2000 page bill which comes out of congress.
Yes, the feds can, and will, hammer a handful of people with these unjust laws.
They can't get everyone. The people will figure this out.
It's like trying to kill a swarm of bees with a baseball bat.
(Bees with internet and cell phones...)
Have a coworker who rides motorcycles all over the Kaibab national forest.
New federal rules will close many of the roads and restrict use.
There are over 2000 miles of roads, and the forest is 1.6 million acres.
There is usually only one enforcement guy on duty at any given time.
Good luck herding those cats.
The government is broke, they can't enforce their micro-managing fantasies.
Will Washington's Failures Lead To Second American Revolution?
Todays free bread provided by the left/right, only the finest Roman bread for true Romans, now off to the circus with you...
IMO information, the way it is spun and managed, has become one of our greatest risks. Information is what we use to base our opinions, whether they are liberal or conservative. We all drink from the same well. Blogs, electronic websites, printed media, broadcast media all can be found to contain misinformation and in some cases downright lies. If there is another revolution we may never know about it until it's too late. Some say read everything from several sources if you want to know the truth, but the total lack of continuity between any of them makes me conclude all are fabricated. No news can be trusted that I can't verify myself. Example: A recent blog contained comments that two ranches had been taken over by the cartels near Laredo, TX. The newspapers there couldn't verify any of the blog comments. Someone on the staff of a local paper drove out to the site and found nothing at all. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn't. The information we consume has IMO become unstable and unreliable.
I read a quote on this site that said: "You do not truly own anything that you can't carry in both arms at a dead run." I'm coming to the opinion that the spirit of this quote can be applied to the information we receive.
"Silver tongued rascals" as Plato labeled them, who manipulate and play upon the people's greed/fear aren't monopolized by the left. When you elect a socialist to office, shouldn't we expect increases in the size and invasiveness of the government? IMHO the current outbreak of leadership failure in the White House is a cyclical affliction not a structural evolution. The American people are responsible for electing him, and if we don't vote the socialist out in 2012 who do we have to blame but ourselves?
Detonics
08-03-2010, 00:52
IMO information, the way it is spun and managed, has become one of our greatest risks. Information is what we use to base our opinions, whether they are liberal or conservative. We all drink from the same well. Blogs, electronic websites, printed media, broadcast media all can be found to contain misinformation and in some cases downright lies. If there is another revolution we may never know about it until it's too late. Some say read everything from several sources if you want to know the truth, but the total lack of continuity between any of them makes me conclude all are fabricated. No news can be trusted that I can't verify myself. Example: A recent blog contained comments that two ranches had been taken over by the cartels near Laredo, TX. The newspapers there couldn't verify any of the blog comments. Someone on the staff of a local paper drove out to the site and found nothing at all. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn't. The information we consume has IMO become unstable and unreliable.
I read a quote on this site that said: "You do not truly own anything that you can't carry in both arms at a dead run." I'm coming to the opinion that the spirit of this quote can be applied to the information we receive.
One of the hot new industries is called "Perception Management" -it's the formalization of what were called "spin doctor" services during prior administrations.
It's basically a public relations firm with survey takers, data analysts, psychologists and lobbyists all rolled into one. Twist the logic, twist the words until you reach the outcome you desire.
Broadsword: Remember 1984: "You don't start a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution. You start a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship."
Well, it has been quite some time (oh 20 yrs) since I have read that book. Thanks for the reminder. I need to go back an re-read it but I do remember that quote and it leaves a mark on my brain.
LarryW:
I heard somebody the other day, it might have been Rush, say that there is no Mainstream Media, there is only propaganda. You are right on the information we receive. I found some alternative sources that I look at, I don't even value what Fox says anymore. I used to trust them.
Detonics:
It's really not that new. New title, it used to be called risk management in public relations. I worked for a firm in Long Island NY when I first moved to NY. We handled all sorts of "sticky and icky situations" and spun it so that people quickly dropped the subject and it became history and no longer worth discussing it or worrying about it.
I guess calling for revolution is far sexier then working door to door for candidates who you support. Phone banking and volunteering/donating to campaigns you support is not nearly as high speed as calling for tossing out 234 years of mostly peaceful elections (Even looking at the civil war free elections put Lincoln and Grant in the WH not a popular uprising or the military).
I would hope that the history on our civil war highlights how nasty a revolution would be and how badly it would end for one side.