"Presidential elections are planned distractions to keep our attention from the action that is happening behind the scenes…." -- Lyrics by Timbuk 3, 1980s alternative pop music band.
That’s what I think about as I watch the march from Iowa to New Hampshire to South Carolina – the GOP presidential nomination caravan slogging across America.
We’ve lost Michele Bachmann, the one true conservative in the race, who had the handicap of being a conservative woman, and therefore not taken seriously by most.
Liberal women politicians are put on a pedestal by the media in the United States, but conservative women are the target of every vile cretin with Photoshop and an Internet connection.
I remain convinced that conservative women like Bachmann and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin must transform the Republican party into an anti-Statist party, fiscally and socially conservative and anti-Federalist in outlook, before they can lead any national ticket.
The Republican Party, despite winning elections, is a rotting hulk with mainstream candidates like Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich castigating frontrunner Mitt Romney for engaging in capitalism, creative destruction, and private equity as a top executive at Bain Capital before entering politics.
Whether Mitt continues to win, we all continue to lose because the fundamentals are absent for the United States. First and foremost, the federal government has a debt now as a large as the U.S. Gross Domestic Product and growing larger every year with each deficit spending budget. The second major issue also mostly ignored during the campaign is the how to return the United States to its Constitutional roots.
According to the Constitution, the primary responsibility of the president of the United States is to serve as the commander in chief and effectively conduct the foreign affairs of the country. In addition, the president can veto legislation that he or she finds unfit. The domestic affairs of the country, therefore, belong to the Congress and the States. The president can ratify what one would presume to be the reasonable output of Congress with everything else left to the States. The agglomeration of power in the hands of the president and the federal government is of course an issue hardly discussed at all in the GOP nomination process, and that’s why the song lyrics above ring so true.
The problem with talking about the debt and the federal deficit is that there is a certain unreality to it. The amount of the debt is so large, $16 trillion, that it is unfathomable to the average person. Furthermore, we have little context for what it means for a country to spend itself into oblivion. The one that comes to mind though is the Roman Empire, a 600-year colossus that over-expanded in foreign wars and in pursuit of treasure and territory. Rome eventually was ransacked by vandals and barbarians, leading to the 500-year European Dark Ages.
In other words we have no clear picture of what the fall of the United States might look like, only a certainty that by not keeping its fiscal house in order it WILL fall, we just don’t know how yet. That’s what makes it pretty tough to jeremiad, because one can’t describe adequately what will happen. Average citizens can’t just say, “Wow, we’ve got to stop spending money that we don’t have because if we don’t then, ‘blank,’ is going to happen.” Frankly we don’t know yet what “blank” is, but when it does happen, everyone is going to be surprised. The only way I think that national bankruptcy could be understood is if we were to get a filmmaker to interview hundreds of Americans who have gone bankrupt and ask them what did they experience, think, and feel. That might catch the attention of some people whose attention needs catching if we are going to mobilize the United States to begin solve its own problems.
The main current model of disaster brewing, which will become an amazing movie/documentary some day, is the situation in Greece, which has a debt to GDP ratio of about 130 percent. Numbers like that are generally considered to be past the point of no return in terms of national; If you go higher than 130 percent, your descent into anarchy is pretty much assured.
Negotiations in Greece are ongoing between the government and its bondholders to come to an agreement on what to do about this. It’s frankly laughable. You have the government saying, “OK, we can’t pay the people who lent us the money that we agreed to pay back, with interest, so please agree to payment that is pennies on the dollar,” or whatever the currency is in Greece. The bondholders on the other hand who have earned great profits on Greek debt are saying, “we are not going to blink, heck, Europe, most noticeably, Germany is going to come our rescue,” due to the interdependent nature of what is euphemistically called the Eurozone, the 17-nation European economic bloc.
So the bondholders are playing an elaborate game of high-stakes chicken. They have gambled and won, and are doubling down. Meanwhile the citizens of Greece are not prepared to give anything back. Many are already rioting in the streets against pension reform or extending the retirement age or cutting health insurance benefits to save their own country. Greece is looking to Germany, the country that invaded it and brutally conquered it during the Second World War, to rescue it now. How strangely ironic. Why should Germany rescue Greece? Greece is a tiny country. Let Greece go into default and see what happens. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism for a country going bankrupt like we do for a business which can reorganize itself in the U.S. court system. When countries go bankrupt we have revolutions and civil wars and military coups.
We are starting to have this sort of anarchy in the United States. Out-of-control spending, government micromanagement of every aspect of our lives, and public sector unions rioting, (see Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana,) all coincidentally taking place during Obama’s communist regime.
What we are seeing over the last 50 years, and that which began with Progressive Era at the start of the 20th century, is the well-documented, thanks to Glenn Beck, unwinding of the American Idea.
The United States became such a successful economic power in about two and a half centuries, because of its tradition of limited government, freedom, and its abundant natural resources. But now with untenable promises to the public sector unions and entitlement programs, combined with the surrender of our educational system to the public school monopoly and its teacher unions, America finds itself, debt-ridden, undereducated, and ill-prepared to tackle the challenges of the 21st Century.
Does American democracy await a Greek-like tragedy? Again as the song goes, it’s “the action behind the scenes.” How much talk has there been during the presidential campaign about the situation in Greece? Not that much.
