Multiculturalism on Way Out…

Multiculturalism is on its way out in Europe Because It Doesn’t Work… Are We Smart Enough to Follow Their Lead?

Netherlands Abandons Multiculturalism

Posted by Dr. Rich Swier on August 12, 2011 at 3:33pm

I have written about the dangers of multiculturalism. When ethnic, religious or immigrant groups do not assimilate into a host nation's society bad things happen. Those countries that try to accommodate multiculturalism end up creating a "state within a state". This multiculturalist state at some point begins to flex is political muscle and demands rights not conferred upon native born or naturalized citizens.

Some even demand the host society pay for their presence in order to placate them. In the United States we have illegal aliens demanding citizenship, access to free education, and medical care not offered to native born or naturalized citizens.

Soeren Kern in Hudson New York reports, "The Dutch government says it will abandon the long-standing model of multiculturalism that has encouraged Muslim immigrants to create a parallel society within the Netherlands."

According to Soeren, "A new integration bill (covering letter and 15-page action plan), which Dutch Interior Minister Piet Hein Donner presented to parliament on June 16, [2011] reads: 'The government shares the social dissatisfaction over the multicultural society model and plans to shift priority to the values of the Dutch people. In the new integration system, the values of the Dutch society play a central role. With this change, the government steps away from the model of a multicultural society'."

The letter continues: "A more obligatory integration is justified because the government also demands that from its own citizens. It is necessary because otherwise the society gradually grows apart and eventually no one feels at home anymore in the Netherlands. The integration will not be tailored to different groups."

The new integration policy will place more demands on immigrants. For example, immigrants will be required to learn the Dutch language, and the government will take a tougher approach to immigrants to ignore Dutch values or disobey Dutch law.

This effort is supported by the new center-right government of Conservatives (VVD) and Christian Democrats (CDA), with parliamentary support from the anti-Islam Freedom Party (PVV), led by Geert Wilders.

Soeren reports, "[P]olls show that a majority of Dutch voters support the government's skepticism about multiculturalism. According to a Maurice de Hond poll published by the center-right newspaper Trouw on June 19, 74 percent of Dutch voters say immigrants should conform to Dutch values. Moreover, 83 percent of those polled support a ban on burqas in public spaces.

Dutch Interior Minister Donner said, "his government "will distance itself from the relativism contained in the model of a multicultural society. Although society changes it must not be 'interchangeable with any other form of society'."

A lesson learned in Europe.

This is exactly what Herman Cain was talking about a few weeks ago and was criticized for and called to task on again on last Thursday’s debate.  Herman Cain says no Sharia Law for America!  Video Here.

Yep, multiculturalism has failed and the worst is yet to come

The Fire This Time  -  By Patrick J. Buchanan

Friday - August 12, 2011

"You've damaged your own race," said Mayor Michael Nutter to the black youths of Philadelphia whose flash mobs have been beating and robbing shoppers in the fashionable district of downtown.
"Take those God-darn hoodies down," the mayor went on in his blistering lecture. "Pull your pants up and buy a belt, 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt."

And the mayor had some advice for teenagers looking for work.
"You walk into somebody's office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back and your shoes untied and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won't hire you?"

"They don't hire you 'cause you look like you're crazy."
Nutter is African-American and the first leader to speak out about the racial character of the flash mobs attacking people in one American city after another. And where are our other leaders?
At the Iowa State Fair last August, black thugs beat a white man so savagely he was hospitalized. Police only began to look into the possibility of a racial attack and hate crime after fair-goers said the thugs were calling it "Beat Whitey Night."

After Memorial Day, Chicago cops had to close a beach when a flash mob formed, attacked people and knocked cyclists off bikes.
In Miami Beach, there were beatings and shootings that same weekend. In D.C., flash mobs of black youths have turned up a half-dozen times in stores to loot clothes and merchandise and flee.
The media almost never identify the race of the thugs. Their reticence would disappear were a white mob in some Southern city to be caught beating up on black shoppers at a mall.

But the flash mob scourge hitting U.S. cities has been eclipsed by the pillaging and burning of London and other British cities in the worst violence visited on that nation and its capital since Goering's Luftwaffe executed the "Blitz."

Thousands of hoodlums, thugs and criminals have firebombed buildings, looted stores and stripped, beaten and robbed people for no reason other than that they were white.

Overwhelmed cops virtually surrendered the city for three days. By the fourth night, the rampage had taken on a multiethnic caste as Asians and white trash appeared to join in the festival of criminality.

Asian and black store owners, too, are victims. In Birmingham, three Pakistani men defending their neighborhood were run over and killed by a truck reportedly driven by a black rioter.

In a country-and-gospel tune recalled often in the '60s, the one that gave James Baldwin the title of his polemic, this couplet appears:

God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
No more water, the fire next time.

A half-century after the long hot summers of the 1960s and two decades after the worst riot in U.S. history since the New York draft riots of 1863 -- the Los Angeles riot of 1992, in which blacks and Hispanics attacked Koreans and whites -- the "next time" may have arrived.

In Europe, the harbinger of the new century came a half-decade ago when North African youths in the Paris banlieues went on a days-long rampage of firebombing cars and attacking police and firemen, many of whom drove off and let the fires burn out.

This week, it was London's turn. And when the fires burn out, we shall hear anew the old liberal litany about poverty, despair, inequality and unemployment, the excuses that long ago ceased to persuade.

For poverty existed in far greater measure in the Depression. Yet our parents and grandparents did not form mobs to burn, beat and loot.

The West is in decline because the character of its people is in decline. In Europe, Christianity is dead. The moral code it gave men to live righteously is regarded with mockery. The London riots were the work of moral barbarians with no loyalty to the people in whose midst they live and no love for the society to which they give nothing, only take.

In America, millions of fatherless young seek out in gangs the familial ties they never knew. Those gangs are now almost always formed on the basis of ethnicity or race.

What were the British thinking when they threw open their doors to mass immigration from the Third World?

Over centuries, they had failed to assimilate a few million Irish, who were European Christians. So, having failed to assimilate the Irish, they decided to invite in millions of Hindus and Muslims from South Asia, Arabs from the Middle East, Africans from the sub-Sahara, black folks from the Caribbean.

But with no common faith or culture to hold the nation together, Britain is coming apart. Multiculturalism has "utterly failed," said Germany's Angela Merkel, only to be echoed by Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron.

Is multiculturalism a success here? Or does the sudden eruption of flash mobs suggest that the curtain has begun to be pulled back on diversity's dark side here in America?

SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/the-fire-this-time-4822

Wake-up America… since we haven’t managed to use our common sense perhaps we can read the signs and warning from Europe… just look at France and the riots in Great Britain this past week.  Multiculturalism like political correctness are tools of the Progressive left, of Marxism, and they don’t work.  They destroy societies and whole countries!!

Related:

It seems that the White House is not hearing the message: Obama’s Ramadan Dinner at the White House

Educational Value of Multiculturalism Debate between Star Parker and Don Barr back in 1996

One World Government Obama

By Ben Stein – American Spectator 

Maybe I missed something, but wasn't that The Constitution of the United States of America that we just laid to rest this weekend?

It was buried in a private ceremony by Mr. Barack Obama of Chicago as he silently signed America on to the One World Government some of us have been worried about for decades.

Look at it this way: Where did Mr. Obama get the authority to commit United States forces to war in Libya? There was no declaration of war. There was no authorizing resolution by Congress allowing money to be spent on a war against Col. Gaddafi. As far as I know, there was no meeting of Mr. Obama and top leaders of Congress to discuss the subject in even rough form, let alone detail. There was no lengthy buildup in which the Congress was "allowed" to express the people's opinion on whether we want to be in a third concurrent war.

There was just a vote by the United Nations Security Council, a very far from unanimous vote, and suddenly, the President's Secretary of State, Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton, solemnly announced that we were at war.

But, when did we amend the Constitution to declare that the United Nations had control over our military? When did we abolish the part of the Constitution that said Congress had the right to declare war? Now, I well know that in recent postwar conflicts, we don't have declarations of war. But we have Congressional  debates. We have funding votes. We have a sense of the Congress or some kind of resolution.

This time, zip. Nada. Nothing. Just France and the U.K. and Norway saying that it's time to go to war, and off America goes to war. And off Mr. and Mrs. Obama go to a South American "fact finding" trip for the POTUS and a fun sightseeing junket for the Obama girls.

(I wonder if there has ever before in history been a national leader who sent his country to war -- and the same day went off on vacation. Has that ever happened before? )

Something's missing here. Libya and Col. Gaddafi were and are no threat to the United States. It is sad and cruel that the Gaddafi regime was murdering its own civilians, but so do many governments all across the world, including North Korea, Iran, the Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, and Cuba. Are we going to war with all of them, now?

Meanwhile, again, what the heck happened to the Constitution? Is this Mr. Obama's legacy to our children? The junking of the Constitution in the middle of the night and the turnover of our sovereignty to the United Nations? (By the way, this is the same UN where Libya until recently sat on the Commission on Human Rights.) Why aren't any questions being asked? Is the Constitution that meaningless to us? Are we that pitiful now? Are we willing to toss overboard the Constitution for the writ of the United Nations? I guess so. Sad days.

Obama’s Foolish Unconstitutional War

Time for Impeachment Hearings?

PAT BUCHANAN: “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
So said constitutional scholar and Senator Barack Obama in December 2007 — the same man who, this weekend, ordered U.S. air and missile strikes on Libya without any authorization from Congress.

Obama did win the support of Gabon in the Security Council, but failed with Germany. With a phone call to acquitted rapist Jacob Zuma, he got South Africa to sign on, but not Brazil, Russia, India or China. All four abstained.

This is not the world’s war. This is Obama’s war.

The U.S. Navy fired almost all the cruise missiles that hit Libya as the U.S. Air Force attacked with B-2 bombers, F-15s and F-16s.

“To be clear, this is a U.S.-led operation,” said Vice Adm. William Gortney.

“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies,” said Winston Churchill. Obama is a quick study.

In his Friday ultimatum, he said, “We are not going to use force to go beyond a well-defined goal — specifically, the protection of civilians in Libya.”

Why, then, did we strike Tripoli and Moammar Gadhafi’s compound?

So many U.S. missiles and bombs have struck Libya that the Arab League is bailing out. League chief Amr Moussa has called an emergency meeting of the 22 Arab states to discuss attacks that have “led to the deaths and injuries of many Libyan civilians.” We asked for a no-fly zone, said Moussa, not the “bombardment of civilians.”

What caused Obama's about-face from the Pentagon position that imposing a no-fly zone on Libya was an unwise act of war?

According to The New York Times, National Security Council aide Samantha Power, U.N. envoy Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton flipped him. The three sisters feel guilty about us not invading Rwanda when Hutu were butchering Tutsi.

They did not want to be seen as standing by when Gadhafi took Benghazi, which he would have done, ending the war in days, had we not intervened.

While Obama is no longer saying Gadhafi must go, Hillary insists that has to be the outcome. No question who wears the pants here.

As U.S. prestige and power are committed, if Gadhafi survives, he will have defeated Obama and NATO.

Hence, we must now finish him and his regime to avert a U.S. humiliation and prevent another Lockerbie.

The Arab League and African Union are denouncing us, but al-Qaida is with us. For eastern Libya provided more than its fair share of jihadists to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq. And jihadists are prominent among the rebels we just rescued.

Yet, even as Obama was announcing U.S. intervention to prevent "unspeakable atrocities," security police of Yemen's President Saleh, using sniper rifles, massacred 45 peaceful protesters and wounded 270. Most of the dead were shot in the head or neck, the work of marksmen.

Had Mahmoud Ahmadinejad done this in Tehran, would U.S. protests have been so muted?

In Bahrain, 2,000 Saudi soldiers and troops from emirates of the Gulf have intervened to save King Khalifa, whose throne was threatened by Shia demonstrators in the Pearl roundabout in Manama. The town square was surrounded, the Shia driven out, the 300-foot Pearl monument destroyed.

This crackdown on Bahrain's Shia has been denounced by Iran and Iraq. Grand Ayatollah Sistani, most revered figure in the Shia world, ordered seminaries shut in protest. This is serious business.

Not only are the Shia dominant in Iran, and in Iraq after the Americans ousted the Sunni-dominated Baathist Party, they are heavily concentrated in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, where the oil deposits are located.

They are a majority in Bahrain, where the U.S. Fifth Fleet is based. Shia Hezbollah is now the dominant military and political force in Lebanon.

Riyadh must have regarded the threat to Bahrain a grave one to have so exacerbated the religious divide and raised the specter of sectarian war.

Yet, again, why are we bombing Libya?

Gadhafi did not attack the West. He faced an uprising to dethrone him and rallied his troops to crush it, as any ruthless ruler would have done. We have no vital interest in who wins his civil war.

Indeed, Gadhafi has asked of Obama, "If you found them taking over American cities by force of arms, what would you do?"

Well, when the South fired on Fort Sumter, killing no one, Abraham Lincoln blockaded every Southern port, sent Gen. Sherman to burn Atlanta and pillage Georgia and South Carolina, and Gen. Sheridan to ravage the Shenandoah. He locked up editors and shut down legislatures and fought a four-year war of reconquest that killed 620,000 Americans — a few more than have died in Gadhafi's four-week war.

Good thing we didn't have an "international community" back then.

The Royal Navy would have been bombarding Lincoln's America.

By Patrick Buchanan at the Creators Syndicate, a collection writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com

California, Here We Come!

By Patrick J. Buchanan

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. -- In just a few weeks time, California hits the wall. And Americans should take a good, long look at the fiscal and social wreck of the Golden Land, because California is at a place to which all of America is heading.

In May, when five fund-raising proposals were put on the ballot, Gov. Schwarzenegger pleaded with the overtaxed Californians not to make their state "the poster child for dysfunction."

As The Economist writes, "On May 18th, they did exactly that."

Arnold went to the White House for U.S. loan guarantees for new state bonds. But with the president's approval rating wilting because of a belief he is spending too much, the Obama-ites slammed the door.

In Sacramento, a Republican blocking force is resisting any new tax revenue. And with the state under a constitutional mandate to balance its budget, yet facing a $24 billion deficit this July, a chainsaw is about to be taken to state government.

Some 38,000 of 168,000 state prisoners may be released. As Barack Obama is pushing universal health insurance, California will cut Medi-Cal for the poor. Education will be slashed, resulting in a shortened school year, thousands of laid-off teachers, school closings and an end to summer programs in a system that has plummeted from the nation's best to one of its worst, as measured by dropout rates and academic achievement.

The 10 campuses of the University of California face cuts that may result in 50,000 fewer students and 5,000 fewer teachers.

What makes her fiscal crisis relevant to us all is not only that California is our most populous state, with one in eight Americans living there, but California has a gross domestic product larger than Canada's.

Moreover, the demography of California today is the demography of America tomorrow, just as the social and fiscal policies of California in the last decade mirror those of the U.S. government today.

One-third of all U.S. wage-earners today have been amnestied from paying U.S. income taxes, as the top 1 percent haul fully 40 percent of that huge load. So, too, in California, the well-to-do and the wealthy are hammered, which is why many have quietly closed their businesses, packed and gone back over the mountains whence their fathers came.

Under George W. Bush and Obama, the U.S. government has undertaken huge new responsibilities: No Child Left Behind, Medicare prescription drug benefits, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the takeovers of banks and auto companies, bailouts without end and national health insurance.

California, too, spent lavishly in the fat years and issued bonds when state revenues did not cover the costs, bringing its once-sterling credit rating down to the nation's lowest. So, too, U.S. Treasury bonds, T-bills and the American dollar are now increasingly suspect.

Demographically, California is where America will be in 2040.

White folks, who are leaving California as they did in the millions in the 1990s, are below half the population. Hispanics, their numbers surging due to legal and illegal immigration, are well over a third of the population. The African-American share of California's population is also falling, as the Asian share is rising, again from immigration.

Los Angeles, which is what most large American cities will look like, is the most diverse city on earth. Has diversity been a strength?

In the prisons and jails, and among the scores of thousands in street gangs and the underclass, a black-brown civil war is underway.

In October 2006, the Financial Times reported the findings of the famed author of "Bowling Alone" on what diversity has wrought:

"A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University's Robert Putnam, one of the world's most influential political scientists. His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone -- from their next-door neighbor to the mayor."

"In the presence of diversity, we hunker down," said Putnam. "We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us."

"Professor Putnam," said the Financial Times, "found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, 'the most diverse human habitation in human history.'"

Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan carried California nine times. But the state is now a fiefdom of liberalism. John McCain's share of the vote was smaller than Barry Goldwater's. California today believes in Big Government, open borders, diversity, multiculturalism and the politics of compassion. But what liberalism has wrought in California, its native-born are fleeing.

Still, where California is at, America is headed.

Californians who are running away from the communities and towns in which they were raised have Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, Utah and Nevada to head to. But when all of America arrives at where California is at today, where do the Americans run to?

---

Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, "The Death of the West,", "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire"and "Where the Right Went Wrong."

Related Resources:

• California Mess A Microcosim of What's In Store For the Rest of Us
  
• California is Liberalism's "Canary in the Coal Mine"

Posted: Daily Thought Pad

The Apologists

For 50 minutes, Obama sat mute, as a Marxist thug from Nicaragua delivered his diatribe, charging America with a century of terrorist aggression in Central America.

After Daniel Ortega finished spitting in our face, accusing us of inhumanity toward Fidel Castro's Cuba, Obama was asked his thoughts.

"I thought it was 50 minutes long. That's what I thought."

Hillary Clinton was asked to comment: "I thought the cultural performance was fascinating," she cooed.

Pressed again on Ortega's vitriol, Hillary replied: "To have those first-class Caribbean entertainers all on one stage and to see how much was done in such a small amount of space. I was overwhelmed."

Thus the nation that won the Cold War, contained the cancer of Castroism in Cuba, liberated Grenada, blocked communist takeovers of Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, and poured scores of billions in aid into this region was left undefended by its own leaders at the Summit of the Americas.

Nor was this the only unanswered insult. Hugo Chavez, who has called Obama an "ignoramus" and Bush "El Diablo," walked over to a seated U.S. president and handed him the anti-American tract "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent."

The book blames Latin America's failures on white Europeans.

It opens, "Renaissance Europeans ventured across the oceans and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations."

Civilizations? Before Pizarro and Cortez, the Inca and Aztec empires these conquistadors overthrew were into human sacrifice.

Evo Morales, the Aymaran president of Bolivia, who is using the race card against Bolivians of European descent, implied a U.S. role in an assassination plot against him.

Argentina's Cristina Kirchner, who allegedly received black-bag money from Chavez, ripped into America for its role in the 1980s. Under Reagan, America aided Britain in the Falklands War, after the Argentine junta invaded the islands, and assisted the Contras in their war of national liberation to oust Ortega's Sandinistas.

Again, Obama offered no defense of his country.

President Lula da Silva of Brazil, who blames the world financial crisis on "white, blue-eyed bankers," told Obama that any future Summit of the Americas without the Castro brothers was unacceptable.

Perhaps Obama believes in turn-the-other-cheek diplomacy, though it is hard to find much success in history for such a policy. Perhaps pacifism is in his DNA. Perhaps he shares the indictment of America that is part of the repertoire of every Latin demagogue.

Whatever his motive, in Trinidad, there were not two sides to the story. There were the trashers of America on the Latino left and a U.S. president who wailed plaintively, "I'm thankful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was 3 months old."

But, the Bay of Pigs, had it succeeded, would have given Cubans 50 years of freedom instead of the brutal dictatorship they have had to endure. And it took place four months before Barack was born.

Obama's silence -- signifying, as it does, assent -- in the face of attacks on his country is of a piece with the "contrition tour" of his secretary of state.

"Clinton Scores Points by Admitting Past U.S. Errors," was the headline over Saturday's New York Times story by Mark Landler:

"It has become a recurring theme of Hillary Rodham Clinton's early travels as the chief diplomat of the United States: She says that American policy on a given issue has failed, and her foreign listeners fall all over themselves in gratitude.

"On Friday, Mrs. Clinton said ... that the uncompromising policy of the Bush administration toward Cuba had not worked. ...

"The contrition tour goes beyond Latin America. In China, Mrs. Clinton told audiences that the United States must accept its responsibility as a leading emitter of greenhouse gases. In Indonesia, she said the American-backed policy of sanctions against Myanmar had not been effective. And in the Middle East, she pointed out that ostracizing the Iranian government had not persuaded it to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions."

Sandler wrote that Hillary brought to mind Bill Clinton:

"On a single trip to Africa in 1998 ... Bill Clinton apologized for American participation in slavery; American support of brutal African dictators; American 'neglect and ignorance' of Africa; American failure to intervene sooner in the Rwandan genocide of 1994; American 'complicity' in apartheid ... ."

Yet, as C.S. Lewis reminds us in "God in the Dock," "The first and fatal charm of national repentance is ... the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing -- but, first, of denouncing -- the conduct of others."

Bewailing the policies of Bush as failures and standing mute in the face of attacks on his country and predecessors may come back to bite Obama.

For when Jimmy Carter assumed a posture of moral superiority over LBJ and Richard Nixon, by declaring, "We have gotten over our inordinate fear of communism," it came back to bite him, good and hard.

by Pat Buchanan

Posted:  Daily Thought Pad

The Weimar Solution

“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency,” said Lord Keynes.
Ben Bernanke disagrees. A student of the Depression, the Fed chair appears far more fearful of deflation — a vicious cycle of falling prices, debt defaults, home foreclosures and rising unemployment.

Deflation is what America underwent in the 1930s. A Fed-created bubble burst, causing margin calls to go out to stockholders, who ran to their banks that, besieged, collapsed, wiping out a third of our money. As Milton Friedman, who won a Nobel for his thesis that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression, told PBS in 2000: “For every $100 in paper money, in deposits, in cash, in currency, in existence in 1929, by the time you got to 1933 there was only about $65, $66 left. And that extraordinary collapse in the banking system, with about a third of the banks failing … with millions of people having their savings essentially washed out, that decline was utterly unnecessary.

“(T)he Federal Reserve had the power and the knowledge to have stopped that. And there were people at the time who were … urging them to do that. So it was … clearly a mistake of policy that led to the Great Depression.”

Is Bernanke fighting the war of 1929 in 2009? Surely, today, with the explosion in M1, the basic money supply, there is no shortage of dollars out there, even if they are not circulating fast enough.

To end our recession, Bernanke may be running an even greater risk: hyper-inflation. This has destroyed more nations than deflation or even depression.

Recall: It was French military intervention in the Ruhr in 1923, to force payment of war reparations, and Weimar’s decision to let the currency fall and pay the French in cheap marks that led to the wipeout of the German middle class, the discrediting of that democratic republic and the Munich beer-hall putsch of Adolf Hitler.

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation,” said Ernest Hemingway, “is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”

Which brings us to last week’s shocker...

The Fed will buy up $300 billion in long-term Treasury bonds and spend $750 billion more buying sub-prime mortgages to remove them from the balance sheets of ailing big banks, to get the banks lending again.
Bernanke is printing money to buy U.S. bonds.

This new gusher from the Fed, after the $700 billion TARP bailout, comes on top of a Congressional Budget Office estimate that this year’s deficit will be $1.85 trillion, 13.1 percent of gross domestic product, more than twice the share of the U.S. economy of the largest previous postwar deficit.

Concluding the dollar is being abandoned in a frantic Fed effort to stop the recession, markets reacted instantly. The dollar plunge was the steepest since the Plaza Agreement of 1985. Gold shot up to $950 an ounce. Silver had a 12 percent run-up, the sharpest ever. Oil prices surged above $50 a barrel. Commodity markets advanced.

The Fed seems to have confirmed the fears of Premier Wen Jiabao, who said that China is “definitely a little worried” about the value of the U.S. bonds Beijing has purchased with the dollars piled up from her trade surpluses with the United States.

Can one blame the Chinese? They have already been burned on their U.S. investments. And if the defense of the dollar against its ancient enemy inflation is being abandoned, and protecting the dollar is to take a back seat to the Fed’s fight to avoid deflation, than it is indeed time to get out of the dollar and dollar-denominated assets.

For inflation is theft. It make liars and cheats of governments. By eroding the value of a currency, inflation punishes savers and creditors and rewards debtors. And what nation is the biggest debtor of them all? The United States of America.

Insidiously, inflation consumes the value of cash, savings, municipal bonds, corporate bonds, Treasury bonds and T-bills. Friends who lent America money, who bought our debt in good faith, are robbed and made fools of, while speculators who bet against America by shorting the dollar in the currency markets are vastly rewarded.
Given the $3.6 trillion budget Obama plans, the $1.8 trillion in red ink he will run by Oct. 1 and the trillions the Fed is pumping into the economy, gross domestic product should spike, as it did after the far smaller stimulus package of 2008.

We will feel a healthy glow, and folks will begin to sing, “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

Yet, one senses that we are doing again exactly what we have done before in this generation. Rather than endure the pain and accept the sacrifices to cure us of our addiction, we are going back to the heroin. And this time, with Dr. Bernanke handling the needle, we may just overdose.

---

By Pat Buchanan who is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, "The Death of the West,"  "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and  "Where the Right Went Wrong."

Obama and the Great Game

by  Patrick J. Buchanan

The day before Richard Holbrooke arrived in Kabul, eight suicide bombers and gunmen attacked the Justice and Education ministries, killing 26 and wounding 57.

Kabul was paralyzed, as the Taliban displayed an ability to wreak havoc within a hundred yards of the presidential palace.

The assault came as President Obama is both conducting a strategic review and deciding how many additional U.S. troops to send.

Earlier, there was talk of 30,000, bringing the U.S. total to 63,000. Now, there are reports Obama may commit no more than the three brigades promised in 2008, and only one brigade now.

Clearly, the United States is checking its hole card. Can we draw to a winning hand? Or is this hand an inevitable loser -- and we must cut our losses and cede the pot? No longer, anywhere, is there talk of "victory."

Nor is the diplomatic news good.

Last week, Kyrgyzstan gave us six months to vacate Manas, the air base used to resupply U.S. forces. A week before, guerrillas blew up a bridge in the Khyber, cutting the 1,000-mile supply line from Karachi to Kabul. Before that, guerrillas bombed U.S. truck parks in Pakistan.

While in Pakistan, Holbrooke was told by all to whom he spoke that, while U.S. Predator strikes may be killing Taliban and al-Qaida, the deaths among tribal peoples are turning Pakistan against us.

What would winning Afghanistan for democracy profit us, if the price were losing a nuclear-armed Pakistan to Islamism?

The expulsion from Manas, after Kyrgyzstan received a reported $2 billion in aid from Moscow, raises a question.

Is Russia restarting "The Great Game" she played against Victoria's Empire in Central Asia, which ended in 1907 with a British-Russian entente, dividing Iran into spheres of influence, with both sides agreeing to keep hands off Afghanistan?

As Russia has as great an interest in preventing an Islamist Kabul, and has assisted NATO's resupply of its forces, why would Moscow seek to expel us from a base vital to the war effort?

Does Russia simply seek to be recognized by the United States as the hegemon of Central Asia, the sole great power that decides who can and who cannot use former Soviet bases?

For if Manas is closed and the Karachi-Khyber-Kabul supply line is compromised or cut, Obama would seem to have but three options.

First would be to go back, hat-in-hand, to Islam Karimov, the Uzbek ruler charged with grave human rights violations, and ask him to reopen the Karshi-Khanabad (K2) air base, from which we were expelled in 2005. And what would be Karimov's asking price?

Second is the Russia option. If Moscow now holds the whip hand in the old Soviet republics, what is Moscow's price to let us remain in Manas or use other Soviet bases over which it wields veto power?

The answer is obvious. Neither Georgia nor Ukraine is to be brought into NATO. The independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, won in the August war with Georgia, is not to be challenged. The U.S anti-missile missiles planned for Poland are not to be deployed.

In turn, Russia will cancel any missile deployment in Kaliningrad, recommits to the terms of all conventional forces agreements in Europe and assist in the effort in Afghanistan. Russia rejoins the West, and the West stays off Russia's front porch.

Be not surprised if the Russians come trolling before an overextended American empire an end to the Great Game in Central Asia like the one the ministers of Nicholas II offered the ministers of Edward VII.

And the third option? It is Iran.

Before 9-11, Iran was more hostile to the anti-Shia Taliban than we, and it has no desire to see them return. Indeed, Tehran was a supporter of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as both were ruled by mortal enemies.

The long way for U.S. and NATO war materiel to reach Kabul via Iran would be through a Turkey-Kurdistan-Iran supply line. The shorter would be from Iranian ports straight into Afghanistan.

Price of an entente? An end to the 30-year U.S.-Iranian cold war and a strategic bargain whereby Iran is allowed to develop peaceful nuclear power, under supervision, the United States lifts its embargo, and regime change is left to the Iranian people.

President Ahmadinejad, no fool, and facing an uncertain election this year, is already signaling interest in negotiations with Obama.

A complication. How would "Bibi" Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman regard a U.S.-Iran rapprochement -- to prevent a Taliban triumph in Kabul?

Yet, if the Taliban's enemies in Russia, Iran, Pakistan and Central Asia will not assist us, this war cannot end well. And if they will not help, Obama should cut America's losses, come home and let their neighbors deal with a triumphant Taliban.

'Buy American' -- or Bye-Bye America

by  Patrick J. Buchanan

"British jobs for British workers!" thundered Gordon Brown, as he emerged from the shadow of Tony Blair to become prime minister.

His populist sloganeering has now come back to bite him.

Across Britain, thousands laid down tools in wildcat strikes in solidarity with a walkout from a French-owned oil refinery in North Killinghome -- to protest a $300 million contract to an Italian company that plans to bring in 400 Italian and Portuguese workers to fulfill it.

As Brown pleaded from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that Britain must not retreat into "protectionism," strikes spread to Scotland, Wales and Ulster.

Britain's commitment to let foreigners buy up its utilities and industries and bring in foreign workers to run them has backfired. Brown's own Labor Party is now angrily demanding that he live up to his pledge: British jobs for British workers.

"The Return of Economic Nationalism," wails the alarmed cover of The Economist. And understandably so.

For the stimulus bills of both Houses have a "Buy American" provision mandating that in "public works" only U.S. iron, steel and manufactures be used. The provision came out of the appropriations committee of the House on a 55-to-0 vote.

The Senate watered it down by declaring the Buy American provision must be consistent with all U.S. trade commitments. But Congress is sending a message: The rebuilding of America is to be a project of, by and for Americans, not outsourced. Sen. McCain's free-trade amendment, to strip all Buy American provisions from the bill, was routed 65 to 31

The reaction of Barack Obama, a NAFTA skeptic in 2008 with bumper stickers that read, "Buy American, Vote Obama," was to genuflect to the gods of globalism and recant his economic patriotism.

"I think it would be a mistake ... at a time when worldwide trade is declining, for the United States to start sending a message that somehow we're just looking out after ourselves," he told Fox News. We don't want to "trigger a trade war," he told ABC.

Apparently, Obama was unnerved by rumbles from Europe, which is threatening to drag us before a World Trade Organization tribunal and have "Buy American" banished forever.

But there is no easy way out now for a Democratic Party where economic nationalism is rampant. If Congress drops or Obama refuses to enforce the Buy American provision, and billions of stimulus dollars are spent on foreign iron, steel and cement, Middle America will know whom to blame. But if Americans get the contracts, and Europeans get nothing, Europe will have to decide whether to retaliate and start a trade war with a populist and nationalist America.

We may be at a turning point in history. For we are about to choose whether to fully and finally cast our lot with globalism, or to become again a nation and people who put Americans first.

We are about to decide, perhaps for all time, whether we believe in a deepening interdependence leading to one world government, or we restore the independence won for us by the men on Mount Rushmore: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

All four were economic nationalists. All would today be decried as protectionists. For all believed that the nation's independence and prosperity hung upon its ability to stand alone in the world, and that foreign goods should never enjoy as privileged access to America's markets as American goods made in the U.S.A.

All four put America first. And it was they who created out of 13 rural colonies the greatest manufacturing power in history. Is not their record superior to what Bush-Clinton-Bush left us: a hollowed-out industrial nation dependent on foreigners for the needs of our national life and for the loans to pay for them?

Even John Maynard Keynes came around in 1933 to believe in "national self-sufficiency."

Those who prattle about the perils of protectionism need to be asked: What has free trade produced, but a bankrupt America that must go hat-in-hand to Beijing to borrow the money to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure? Are we also to use Chinese iron, steel and cement because they, with their Third World wages, will work for less than our fellow Americans?

As for Europe's threat of a trade war, bring it on!

We would eat their lunch. As analyst Charles McMillion writes, in eight years of Bush, Canada ran up $500 billion in trade surpluses at our expense, Japan ran up $600 billion, the European Union $800 billion.

These three trading partners, often by imposing value-added taxes on U.S. imports, and rebating those taxes on goods sold here, racked up $1.9 trillion in trade surpluses, sucking jobs, factories and technology out of the United States. These trade deficits, and the even larger ones with China, says Paul Volcker, are behind our present crisis.

America is bust. It is shameful to have to go to China and Japan to borrow the money to rebuild America. But to go to China and Japan and borrow billions, and not spend the money here, makes zero sense.

We have indulged in free trade for a quarter century. And look where it has gotten us.    

Source:  Human Events   

An Unnecessary Defeat?

by  Patrick J. Buchanan 

11/07/2008

Why did John McCain lose?

Let's start with those "headwinds" into which he was flying.

The president of the United States, the leader of his party, was at Nixon-Carter levels of approval, 25 percent, going into Election Day.

Sixty-two percent of the nation thought the economy was the No. 1 issue, and 93 percent thought the economy was bad. Two-thirds of the nation thought the war McCain championed was a mistake, and 80 percent to 90 percent thought the country was on the wrong course.

As a political athlete, measured by charisma and communications skills, McCain is not even in the same league with Barack Obama. He was outspent by vast sums, and his political organization was far inferior.

It is a wonder McCain was even competitive, dealt such a hand.

Yet, by Sept. 10, McCain, thanks to Sarah Palin, whose selection had proven a sensation, had come from eight points behind to take the lead, and Joe Biden was wailing that maybe Hillary would have been a better choice for Obama.

Then came the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the bailout of AIG, McCain's assertion that the economy was fundamentally sound, and his panicked return to Washington to assist Bush and Hank Paulson push through a wildly unpopular bank bailout -- using 700 billion in tax dollars to buy up rubbish paper the idiot bankers had put on their books.

The Establishment's Man had come to save the Establishment.

Suddenly, it was McCain who was down 10 points, as the feline and feral press went on a wilding attack on Sister Sarah. He never recovered, though the McCain-Palin final push left egg on the faces of pollsters who were predicting a double-digit triumph for Obama.

Perhaps no Republican, in these circumstances, could have won, especially with that month-long bloodletting on Wall Street that wiped out $4 trillion to $5 trillion in stock and bond value, ravaging IRAs and 401Ks, portfolios and pensions alike.

Yet, McCain might still have won had he not, like his three fellow establishment Republicans Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, been inhibited by the Mainstream Media and his own Beltway beliefs.

Consider. In California, where a liberal judiciary had ordered the state to recognize homosexual marriages, voters, by 52 to 48, slapped the judges across the face and ordered the ban reimposed and placed in the California constitution. Arizona and Florida also voted to outlaw gay marriage, by landslides.

The New York Times deplored the "ugly outcome" of these three referenda and said voters were "enshrining bigotry," thus calling the majority of Californians, Arizonans and Floridians bigots and their Bible-rooted Christian beliefs nothing but bigotry.

Good to know what they think of us. Yet, McCain, who might have been out front on these moral and cultural issues, paid only lip service -- and lost Florida, and California by a landslide.

In Missouri, where McCain eked out a victory, a proposal to make English the official state language carried six to one. In Nebraska, a proposal to ban affirmative action carried 58 to 42, but lost in a 50-50 tie in Colorado.

Parental notification won 48 percent support in California, a far higher share of the vote than McCain got, while a measure to outlaw abortion except in cases of rape, incest and the life of the mother got 45 percent in South Dakota. Had McCain made an issue of Obama's support for a Freedom of Choice Act that would eliminate all state restrictions on abortion, he could have forced Obama to defend what yet remains a radical and extreme view in America.

While Barack was locking up black America, McCain failed to hold onto Bush's share of the white working class, though Obama had the most liberal voting record in the Senate and long associations with the likes of Jeremiah Wright and '60s bomber William Ayers.

Perhaps fearful his "good guy" reputation with his old buddies in his media "base" would be imperiled, McCain ruled Wright off limits and seemed hesitant even to go after the Ayers connections. Lee Atwater would not have been so ambivalent. Leo Durocher put it succinctly: "Nice guys finish last."

Ultimately, however, the Beltway Republicans are losing Middle America because they are ideologically incapable of addressing two great concerns: economic insecurity and the perception that we are losing the America that we grew up in.

Economic insecurity is traceable to NAFTA-GATT globalization, under which it makes economic sense for U.S. companies to close factories here, build plants in China and export back to the United States. Manufacturing now accounts for less than 10 percent of all U.S. jobs.

Social insecurity is traceable to mass immigration, legal and illegal, which has brought in scores of millions who are altering the character of communities and competing with U.S. workers by offering their services for far less pay.

These are the twin causes of death of the Reagan coalition, and as long as the Republican Party is hooked on K Street cash, it will not address either, and thus pass, blissfully addicted, from this earth.

Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, "The Death of the West,", "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire"and "Where the Right Went Wrong." 

 

Reader Comments:

ONE PARTY RULE AND THE COMING DEMOCRATIC TOTALITARIANISM OF SAMENESS

THE END OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
lawrencehoule@yahoo.com

Make no mistake as to the historical nature of Obama’s election victory. 

Americans throw overboard a man who had devoted his entire life to his country for 55 years - a man who had fought against corruption in Washington and voted in one of the most corrupt anti-American, Americans in the history of Presidential elections. 

Americans have now made a virtue of and institutionalized corruption. They have also made a farce out of serving your country. 

Americans have effectively voted to bring an end to their two political party democracy and will now impose one party rule. Democratic totalitarism is coming to America.

When Nikita Khrushnev stated that the Soviet Union will bury American capitalism little could he have realized that Americans would finish the job for him. 

The prime imperative directive for the Obama and the Democrats is to move asap under the national radar screen to create a nation wide system of community organizers to bring revolutionary ideology to the streets and organize every street, every apartment building to establish a permanent dependency of the masses with the Democratic Party. Key to the creation of this Democratic Party majority will be to organize and fast track all illegal immigrants and open the flood gates of immigration.

It can be anticipated that over the next 8 years, 10’s and 10’s of millions will pour into the US. Perhaps as much as 100 million will be in the US to take active part in the state welfareism. 

ACORN and the new civilian militia that Obama wants to build will be central to this massive organizational effort to create a permanent voting majority leading to a bullet proof 270 electoral votes. 

The tens of billions to support the tens of dependent millions will come from the bitter Americans who will now fund the new Democratic permanent majority of state dependents as their patriotic duty. 

Forever and ever, the new President will be selected by the Democratic Party. Whomever they decide will be President will be President. A Democratic totalitarism of sameness will be institutionalized in the schools and across the land.