Author: Bob Livingston

A disturbing spectacle was on display last week as Mexican President Felipe Calderon and President Barack Obama—standing almost hand-in-hand on the White House lawn—trashed the state of Arizona over its new immigration law. Calderon then took it a step further by going onto the floor of Congress and trashing Arizona and Arizonians some more.

During the White House meeting, Obama told Calderon, “In the 21st Century we are defined not by our borders, but by our bonds.” He also agreed with Calderon’s description that Arizona’s law is discriminatory.

We’ve come to expect such treachery from the White House, which prides itself in traveling around the world bowing and scraping and accusing the United States of a multitude of sins—both real and imagined—and apologizing for every national and foreign policy decision the country has ever made.

(See Deputy Secretary of State Michael Posner’s admission that during a recent trip to China he brought up the Arizona law “early and often” as an issue of “discrimination or potential discrimination.” Again, he did this in China, a country that runs over its citizens with tanks, throws them in prison for practicing “unapproved” Christianity, and forces families to abort children to enforce a one-child policy.)

But then Calderon went into the halls of Congress—as an invited guest—and trashed Arizona some more saying the bill “introduces a terrible idea that uses racial profiling as a basis for law enforcement.” And for that Democrats in Congress gave him a standing ovation.

Never mind that the law does no such thing. In fact, it forbids discrimination and follows Federal immigration laws almost to the letter.

The Democrat Party continues to find new lows to fall to in its treatment of Americans—ramming through healthcare legislation over the objections of the majority, siding with enemies of Democracy and joining with the president of a failed nation to vilify a state that was forced to enforce laws the Federal government refused to enforce.

George Washington once wrote:

“We are either a United people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation, which have national objects to promote, and a national character to support. If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it.”

More and more it seems Obama and the Democrats have decided upon the latter. And more and more the spinelessness of Republicans is on display as they fail in their duty to forcefully call out Obama and the Democrats.

Obviously the elites of the two parties have become peas in the same pod and they have chosen a path in opposition to the very people they supposedly serve. That they would side with the Mexican president over the citizens of Arizona—and about 70 percent of Americans—is despicable.

It could be caused by thick or sludged blood due to dehydration. If the blood is thick or sludging, high blood pressure follows. Water thins the blood and lowers high blood pressure. Drink more water.

Keep your eyes focused on the rogue corporatist Congress over the next couple of weeks as the reconciliation process takes place to merge the House and Senate versions of the financial reform legislation in a conference committee.

While the provisions in the two bills which further centralize control over the financial system in the hands of power-grabbing chief executive are bad enough, a provision in the House version that has nothing at all to do with finance has really caught our attention and must be defeated.

It’s an amendment that would give the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) the authority to require supplement companies perform at least two human studies before making any claims for their products, according to the Alliance for Natural Health (ANH). Currently, supplements are regulated under the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA).

The amendment to HR 4173 was introduced by Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and has nothing to do with the financial services industry. But it will limit your ability to acquire and use natural health supplements.

The trials the amendment requires are time-consuming and beyond the financial means of most supplement companies, according to the ANH. And even if the companies could find the money, the FTC could require more and more costly versions of these studies, or more of those studies. At each stage, fewer supplements would be available, and those available would cost more and more, until they became as costly as drugs.

The decisions about supplements would then be placed in the hands of five unelected FTC commissioners who could issue binding regulations in a wide range of areas. And companies that didn’t comply with the new rules could be put out of business.

It’s not an unusual tactic as the FTC has done this before with other companies who didn’t toe their line.

“According to renowned constitutional attorney Jonathan Emord, ‘The provision removing the ban on FTC rulemaking without Congressional preapproval contained in H.R. 4173 invites the very same irresponsible over-regulation of the commercial marketplace that led Congress to enact the ban in the 1980s. FTC has no shortage of power to regulate deceptive advertising; this bill gives it far more discretionary power than it needs, inviting greater abuse and mischief from an agency that suffers virtually no check on its discretion.’” (www.anh-usa.org)

Waxman is an enemy to freedom, choice in medical decisions and to the supplement industry. On his website, Waxman writes: “I am troubled that the FDA lacks the basic information necessary to protect consumers from unsafe dietary supplements. The FDA clearly needs to have more resources to give consumers real protection. I intend to work with my colleagues in Congress to ensure that FDA has the tools it needs to address this and other important public health missions.”

What he means is that big pharma doesn’t profit from natural supplements so Big Brother needs to quash them. By the way, the top four industries contributing to Waxman’s campaign in the 2009-2010 cycle are: hospitals/nursing homes; health services/health maintenance organizations (HMOs); lawyers/law firms and health professionals.

While it’s bad enough that Congress’ elected elitists are more interested in protecting their sugar daddies (large financial firms that slip large amounts of cash into their pockets) than Average Joe; what’s worse is their desire to limit your freedom to make choices about which natural health supplements you can take.

We urge you to call your Senators and member of Congress this week and tell him or her to make sure no provisions restricting the use of supplements get included in the final version of the financial reform bill. You can find your member of Congress here.

And finally, I’m often struck (or saddened) by the comments from some who post on this site who fail to see how their government moves past socialism toward fascism on a daily basis. They often ask—sometimes by logging in under several different names and carrying on a conversation with themselves in an effort to disrupt a discussion—exactly what freedoms are being taken away by an overreaching corporatist government.

Well, here’s one: the ability to make your own decisions about your health and how you choose to remain healthy.

There are many others: like freedom of speech, freedom of association, gun ownership, the ability to own property (if you are required to pay a tax in order to keep it, is it truly yours?), freedom to operate a business as you see fit, freedom to pass along your earnings to your children and the freedom to decide whether your children are given potentially harmful vaccinations (enforced through rules requiring vaccinations to enroll in public schools).

If you are too blind to see that these things are happening daily, then may God help you, because you are incapable of helping yourself.

Dear Bob

What about people who don’t have large sums of money to “invest” in your precious metals. What about the poor or the ones who struggle every day to get by. What do they do?

ALC

Dear ALC,

I understand that many are struggling to get by, especially those who are out of work or are on fixed incomes. However, you can still take steps to prepare for an uncertain future. Without knowing your specific situation I can’t give more than general advice. However, you should work to extricate yourself from debt. You should set aside a little non-perishable food (as much as you can afford) every time you go shopping. To invest in precious metals, I would recommend silver. Its price is around $17-$18 per ounce and you can buy it one ounce at a time, if that better fits your budget.

Best Wishes,
Bob

The administration of President Barack Obama has itself tied up in quite a knot.

The administration that opposes enhanced interrogations, that wants to treat terrorists caught both on the battlefield and in country as common criminals, that wants to try suspected 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a New York City courtroom, that read Miranda rights to the foreign-born underwear bomber right away but delayed it for hours for the naturalized citizen Times Square bomber, has targeted an American citizen living in Yemen for assassination.

Of course, since the United States government has a policy against assassination that’s not what it’s being called. But what else do you call the order designating American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki as a target for a strike by a drone missile?

Awlaki is suspected by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of actively plotting violence. He is described in The New York Times as “a charismatic preacher who has said it is a religious duty to attack the United States.” The CIA says it believes Awlaki’s rhetoric inspired Times Square attempted-bomber Faisal Shahzad.

Of course Shahzad’s visit to Pakistan where he met with a member of an intelligence group with ties to the CIA surely had nothing to do with the bomb attack, but that is a topic for another day.

Whether Awlaki gets blown to bits by a Hellfire missile or shot in the head by a sniper, he’s dead and the U.S. government has become judge, jury and executioner.

To eavesdrop on Awlaki’s telephone calls the CIA—because of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—would first be required to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But to target him for death the CIA only needed approval from the National Security Council (NSC).

As former CIA lawyer Vicki Divoll told The Times, “Congress has protected Awlaki’s cell phone calls. But it has not provided any protections for his life. That makes no sense.”

I wonder if Awlaki will be read his Miranda rights before the missile explodes, or will Attorney General Eric Holder wait until afterwards and read them over Awlaki’s bits and pieces.

But wait. That might not be a problem because some in Congress want to take away Americans’ guaranteed citizenship rights if they target fellow citizens with terrorist violence.

Senator Joe Leiberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said recently, “If you’re attacking your fellow Americans in an act of war you lose the rights that come with citizenship.”

And this is where it gets really sticky. The Obama administration has yet to call the Times Square bomb plot an act of terrorism. On the White House website it is referred to as the “Times Square incident.” Or, to paraphrase Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, it was a potential man-caused disaster.

We are no longer sliding down a slippery slope. Now we are cascading down a steep mountainside.

It began soon after 9/11 with the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act in the weeks following the attack. That act is already being used to strip U.S. citizens of their rights. Just ask Jose Padilla and Ashton Lundeby how that act is working out for them.

Now we have an administration that has shown a proclivity to use missile attacks from Predator drones to kill what it is calling insurgents or terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan—and killing innocents in the process—saying that it’s time to use them in a country we’re not currently at war with to kill an American citizen who hasn’t harmed anyone himself.

That same bunch doesn’t call planting a bomb in Times Square terrorism. But it warns that those who oppose its policies—and show their opposition by demonstrating and holding up signs outside the Capitol building and in cities and towns across the country—are potentially inciting attacks similar to Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

If they think the rhetoric of Tea partiers—or Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or whoever—is somehow inciting violence, how long is it before the administration starts authorizing drone missile attacks on them?

Apparently, all it takes to get on the CIA’s short list for a missile strike is for someone in the administration to decide you are inciting violence. That doesn’t bode well for a group that has drawn the ire of Obama, his administration, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid, who are on record as considering Tea partiers, former military members and anti-healthcare reform protestors as Nazis and terrorists.

American citizens… beware… this administration thinks you’re more dangerous and deserve fewer rights than foreigners planting bombs on U.S. soil. And if you hear the far-off hum of an airplane or the whoosh of a missile being fired, run like Satan himself is on your heels.

But if you’re al-Qaida don’t worry. Holder will read you your rights and have a court appointed attorney standing by.

History can be a funny thing. Sometimes the sands of time obscure facts from those with only a passing knowledge of the truth.

So it is with some of the Founding Fathers. As a group they are revered by many for their knowledge, wisdom and forethought. They are seen as selfless defenders of liberty.

But that view is not completely accurate. Take the case of Alexander Hamilton, described by Thomas J. DiLorenzo in Hamilton’s Curse as essentially the anti-Thomas Jefferson—a man who would be pleased with America’s economic system today.

Hamilton’s Curse is not a biography of Hamilton. Rather it describes “his core political and economic ideas; the intellectual, legal, and political battles over those ideas; and the consequences America has suffered since his ideas were implemented,” DiLorenzo writes.

Although he was a principal author of The Federalist Papers and championed the adoption of the United States Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation, he began to work immediately to undermine its tenants as President George Washington’s first Treasury Secretary.

What Hamilton really favored was a strong central government. In fact, as DiLorenzo writes, Hamilton opposed the Articles of Confederation because it did not empower a centralized government. He wanted America to be ruled by a king that would have supreme power over all the people. He favored making the states provinces with governors appointed by—and therefore loyal to—the king.

Under such a regime, all political power in the nation would be exercised by the king and his circle of advisors, which undoubtedly would include Hamilton. Essentially, Hamilton wanted to turn the United States into Britain.

But what Hamilton wrote in The Federalist Papers sounded quite Jeffersonian, leading many to believe later that he was being less than sincere in the writings, DiLorenzo writes.

“More likely, his writings were intended to goad the public into acquiescing in the adoption of a document that he hoped would become a ‘living constitution,’” according to DiLorenzo. Hamilton later described the Constitution as “a frail and worthless fabric.”

Among the legacies of Hamilton and his acolytes is the idea that the Constitution granted the Federal government “implied powers”—powers that were not actually in the Constitution but that statists like Hamilton wish were there.

He favored a central bank, activist judges and mercantilist system modeled after the British system.

DiLorenzo writes that Hamilton was likely the first to twist the meaning of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, claiming the clause was an all-inclusive term for all commercial activities in society, and therefore that the government had a “right” to regulate and control all commerce—not just trade but intrastate commerce as well.

Hamilton believed “public” debt was a blessing, and he favored high taxes and paying subsidies (corporate welfare) to certain businesses.

While small government advocates in the Jeffersonian tradition won out over the Hamiltonians in the beginning, the Hamiltonians—or nationalists, as DiLorenzo calls them—never relented in their efforts.

Finally, in 1913 with the establishment of the Federal Reserve and the passage of the 16th Amendment (granting the power to lay and collect taxes) and 17th Amendment (changing the way Senators are selected), the Hamiltonian philosophy prevailed.

Hamilton’s economic philosophy is in play today, and is the source of our country’s economic ills. DiLorenzo lays this all out in excellent fashion and peels back the layers of historical revisionism that have lionized Hamilton and others who believed as he did.

DiLorenzo makes an excellent case that if we are to return to the republic the Founding Fathers like Jefferson and James Madison envisioned we must end the Federal Reserve and repeal the 16th and 17th Amendments.

Freedom-loving Americans who are interested in devolving themselves of the glossed-over public school history they learned—and the false history being perpetuated today—must read this book.

Simply adding carrots to your diet can help your eyes stay clear and focused. The bright orange vegetable provides plenty of beta-carotene to help your body use vitamin A. This vitamin helps with cell maintenance, inflammation and infection. Try adding carrots to your salad, sandwich or stir fry. Not only will it provide health benefits, but a burst of color, too!

With very little notice the United States Senate voted 96 to 0 last week to require the Government Accountability Office to audit the Federal Reserve’s emergency actions during and after the 2008 financial crisis.

The measure was an amendment to legislation to overhaul the financial regulatory system and was proposed by socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). It was a watered down version of Sanders’ original provision that would have subjected the Fed to continuing audits of its routine operations.

It’s also weaker than the House-approved version that passed late last year which authorized audits of every item on the Fed’s balance sheet. The two bills will have to be reconciled later and one of its sponsors in the House, Representative Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), is confident the stronger version will prevail in conference. The bill’s original sponsor, Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) isn’t so sure.

We can only hope Grayson is right. The White House, the Fed and most Senators opposed the stronger version but agreed to the weaker version. That means they feel it doesn’t have any teeth. As evidence, an amendment by Senator David Vitter (R-La.) that would have mirrored the House language failed on a 62 to 37 vote. Sanders and six Democrats joined 30 Republicans in favor. (As an aside: Liberals, read that last sentence again and answer—who is it that is the party of the banksters? Still not sure? Then what about President Obama’s trip to New York May 13 to raise money for the Democrat party from Wall Street “fat cats” at $15,000, $30,000 and $50,000 a plate?)

You may remember that back in 2008 the fraud the biggest banksters had been pulling off began to unravel. Their scheme of playing both sides against the middle—selling off their debt falsely sold as safe bets while placing side bets they would collapse—fell apart. But it was good while it lasted because in the beginning they profited both ways.

So President George W. Bush abandoned free market principals to save the free market system. Big banksters Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson—Bush’s Fed chairman and Treasury secretary—convinced him to loot the U.S. Treasury to pay off their buddies at the other big banks. The result was the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), a $700 billion bailout of the financial institutions.

Bernanke, as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2004, said in a speech, “we are in a new era, where economic volatility has been permanently eliminated.” It seems he missed on that prediction.

As for Paulson, prior to being named Treasury secretary he was the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Coincidently, Goldman Sachs got $10 billion in TARP funds.

With Bernanke’s incompetent pronouncements and Paulson’s ties to Goldman Sachs, you had the foxes guarding the henhouse… and one of them had no clue. And President Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is no better. As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York he worked with Paulson to bail out American International Group (AIG)—the firm that paid bonuses of about $165 million to its executives—and together the two decided to let Lehman Brothers fail.

Since the bailouts some in Congress have been trying to learn from the Fed who got what and when did they get it. So far all they’ve gotten is silence.

And that’s what the audit bill is all about; trying to pry the lid off the secret Fed.

But you must understand what the Fed is. It is neither Federal (part of the U.S. Government) nor does it hold reserves, writes G. Edward Griffin in his book, The Creature from Jekyll Island.

It was formed by six conspirators who met in secret in 1910 on Jekyll Island, Ga., writes Antony C. Sutton in his book, The Federal Reserve Conspiracy. Those men were Senator Nelson Aldrich (father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and a representative of the Standard Oil crowd); German banker Paul Warburg, of the German bankers MM Warburg of Hamburg and Kuhn Loeb in the U.S.; Henry P. Davison, partner in J.P. Morgan and Chairman of Bankers Trust Company; Benjamin Strong, vice president of Banker’s Trust; Frank Vanderlip, chairman of National City Bank; and Charles D. Norton, president of First National Bank.

The Fed is a corporation, but it is unlike any other corporation in America. It pays no taxes. Its articles of incorporation are not filed in any state. There is no list of its stockholders anywhere, according the book, They Own It All (Including You).

Since its inception it has operated in secret. The only information that ever comes out is whatever the Fed chairman wants to reveal when he sits before Congress. If you’ve ever watched that dance on C-Span you know Congress never gets real answers.

But, despite its secrecy, it controls the money in the United States. It decides the interest rates banks pay… which ultimately decides the interest rates you pay. It decides how much money is printed… which devalues your savings and investments. It also decides which businesses survive—AIG—and which businesses fail—Lehman Brothers.

This is not a free market system. It’s a system of theft and destruction.

Chelation therapy is an artery cleanout alternative to bypass heart surgery. Since bypass surgery is the most profitable income to hospitals, a big propaganda effort by orthodox medicine against chelation therapy is ongoing and has been for many years.

Medical doctors who practice intravenous (I.V.) chelation keep a low profile because of pressure and harassment from the medical establishment.

Oral chelation is a safe and noninvasive way to boost circulation and reduce plaque and toxins in your circulatory system. It can work miracles over time. It is usually taken by mouth in capsule form. The basis of oral chelation is most often a simple acid ethylene-diamine-tetraacetic acid (EDTA).

Chelation was originally created to remove heavy metals that accumulate in the arteries from the industrial use of paints and other materials. It was discovered that workers who had heart trouble got much better while taking EDTA (chelation therapy) to remove heavy metals. The chelation therapy would bind to organic molecules and purge the arteries clean naturally, renewing the artery system. The long history of efficacy is proven and the benefits well-known, but often controversial with the conventional medical establishment.

(Article continues below…)

I.V. and oral chelation, even with medical blackout, have become strong alternatives to surgery over the past 60 years. Chelation is inexpensive and noninvasive and works all over your body.

Clogged arteries seem to come with aging. Oral chelation has been the answer for improved circulation for millions of people.

Enhanced Oral Chelation™ from Health Resources™ is a product I’ve used personally for many years. This powerful nutritional formula helps support cardiovascular health and promote healthy circulation by supplying much-needed nutrients to your circulatory system. So Enhanced Oral Chelation™ is a powerful source for heart nutrition. There is no history of risk.

The American Medical Association has approved I.V. EDTA chelation for the removal of toxic metals. But we have the history to prove that chelation helps promote peripheral circulation which is basic to life, health and longevity.

The American College of Advancement of Medicine (ACAM) estimates that at least a
million patients have received more than 10 million I.V. chelation treatments without a single fatality.

The record for oral chelation is even more exciting since it is safe, inexpensive, easy and something you can do in your own home without needles or doctors.

The pending retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens gives President Barack Obama an opportunity to shape court decisions for many years to come. Let’s hope he makes a wise decision.

Unfortunately, his radical leftist views that the United States Constitution is a “charter of negative liberties” and his prior choice of Sonya Sotamayor—who as an appellate judge ruled that the New Haven fire department’s promotion test was discriminatory because no minorities scored well enough for promotion—to the Supreme Court don’t augur well for liberty.

Liberals like to say the Constitution is a “living, breathing document,” because that allows activist judges to create “rights” out of thin air in order to advance an agenda. But what is needed are strict constructionist justices who are willing to go back and see what the Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the document.

“On every question of construction,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one which was passed.”

The Founders understood that government could easily become the enemy of the people. So they wrote a Constitution that put restraints on the government.

If we are to remain free we need to watch closely the people Obama nominates for the courts—the Supreme Court most importantly. They must be people who recognize the role of government. They must understand that the Constitution was written to protect the citizens from its government, not the government from its citizens. They must recognize that all men are created equal, and that no group or class is more equal than another. If not, we must do all we can to block them.

Because, as Samuel Adams said, “[W]ithout liberty and equality [under the law], there cannot exist that tranquility of mind, which results from the assurance of this to every citizen, that his own personal safety and rights are secure … it is the end and design of all free and lawful Governments.”

Feeling stressed? Try rhodiola—an herb that is classified as an “adaptogen.” This means it can help normalize your body’s response to stress. After taking rhodiola for 10 weeks, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) study patients experienced a 50 percent reduction in symptoms such as worry, tension, fatigue and headaches. Other herbs in this mood-boosting group include ginseng and licorice.

Dear Bob,

I have a question. Would you go into debt to buy a house at this time in our economy? I’m in a tough spot. We took my father out of a nursing home last October due to neglect. Ever since, we have been traveling between two houses to take care of him, but it is getting to be a real strain on our family members who care for him day in and day out. My husband and I are debt-free, renting a house, and my father is renting the house we grew up in as kids (my brother owns it. It is not paid off).  

If we move to a bigger house with my father, we would be relying on his fixed income (pension and social security) to make the payments plus my husband’s modest salary. Neither house we are in at the time is big enough for all of us.

If the county goes into hyperinflation, I don’t think we would be a able to get to my dad’s, who is 12 minutes (4 miles) from our house. I feel the need to get us under one roof for the rough times that are surely ahead. My dad is 89 with Parkinson’s and I am scared I won’t be able to get diapers and medicine and take care of him if there is a crash. He feels very secure when I am with him.

Will people who just have assumed a mortgage have their house repossessed during a crisis or will too many people be in the same boat? I’ve tried to look this question up online and they basically say to rent right now. Maybe we should just get in a bigger rental verses buying?

We rent on a farm in Illinois and have chicken’s, goats, eggs, and big garden. My dad’s home is in a subdivision. If we move, we would buy a small farm, probably in Kentucky. 

Sincerely,
Jill Novak

Dear Jill,

You are in a tough spot, and I feel for you and your predicament. My first suggestion would be that you explore the possibility of adding on to the house you currently live in so that you can make a room for your father. In addition to giving you more room, if it’s done correctly it will increase the value of the house. If that is not possible, then next I would suggest you seek another house to rent. Since you live on a farm with some livestock and a garden you are in good position should the currency collapse that we are expecting occur. I would hate to see you give that up.

I would also hate to see you take on debt if you can avoid it in any way. Please explore all options before making that decision. Purchasing a home and taking on debt will limit the amount of funds you have at your disposal to prepare for the coming collapse buy buying storage food and gold and silver.

Best wishes,
Bob

(Part two of a two-part series. The first part was Democrats And The Politics Of Envy.)

Ask a yellow dog Democrat why he’s a Democrat and he’ll usually say it’s because the Democrat Party is the party of the working man. He believes it so strongly that he’d vote for the Democrat over anyone else, even if the Democrat on the ticket was an old yellow dog.

It doesn’t matter that Democrat policies have been devastating to the poor and middle class workers in this country for almost 100 years. The poor and middle class still turn out in droves to vote for them. Democrat politicians have successfully positioned themselves as the party of the poor, and they’ve created an enmity between the poor and the rich.

Democrats leaders perpetuate this enmity with popular slogans like “living wage,” “fair share,” “working poor,” “greedy rich,” “rich Republicans” and “evil profits.” Their rank and file have bought it hook, line and sinker.

The Great Society
By the late 1950s, ever-resilient America had somewhat recovered from the effects of Woodrow Wilson’s policies—the Federal Reserve, the income tax and World War I—and Franklin Delano Roosevelt policies—the New Deal and World War II—and prosperity was returning.

Then along came Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Great Society and the next great expansion of the nanny state. Previous Democrat administration policies had been devastating to the people they purported to help and, with his Great Society programs, Johnson continued the assault on the poor under the guise of giving them a hand up.

Within three years of assuming the Presidency in 1963, Johnson had requested 200 major pieces of legislation and Congress had approved 181 of them, according to Leslie Carbone in Slaying Leviathan: The Moral Case for Tax Reform. She writes:

“Roosevelt had peddled the drug of government give-aways primarily in the poor neighborhoods; Johnson set up shop in middle-class cul-de-sacs, and most Americans, willingly or unwillingly, wittingly or unwittingly, are forced to shoot up. Johnson’s sweeping proposals sought to address almost every issue of concern to Americans: civil rights, poverty, education, health, housing, pollution, the arts, cities, occupational safety, consumer protection, and mass transit, to name only the most prominent.”

As she quotes Johnson aide Joseph Califano from the book Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, “LBJ adopted programs the way a child eats rich chocolate-chip cookies.”

And what have these programs wrought? Mark Owen, adjunct professor of economics at Northwood University, wrote a column for LewRockwell.com on Feb. 7, 2007 entitled The Welfare State: Shredding Society. In it he said:

“Births out of wedlock were consistently at or below 5% between 1940 and 1960. By 1970, the rate had risen to over 10% and has continued to rise to 33% of all births today… Divorce rates increased from 9 to 23 per 1,000 married couples annually from 1960 to 1980, while leveling off at 20 per 1,000 through 1998. How much of this leveling off in divorce rates is the result of relationships in groups with higher divorce tendencies never evolving past cohabitation is difficult to ascertain. Over half of children born today in the US will live in a single parent household, while in some areas the rate is much higher. It is hard to ignore the statistical relationship between crime and family dissolution.

“While crime and family destabilization may be two of the more obvious results of the welfare state, there are many others. The stigma for single mother births has virtually disappeared. Intergenerational dependency on government programs with the related lack of skills for self-sufficiency, much like a farm animal unable to live without the farmer for food and shelter, has created people without hope or ambition.”

The welfare state has created a cycle of dependency that perpetuates itself. Now there are third and fourth generations of single women living off welfare and raising children in single parent homes.

Typically these women live in urban areas and their children are held hostage to failing inner city schools systems. And Democrat policies are to blame for these failing schools.

In 1965 Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It provided for aid to poor children in slums and rural areas, created a five-year program for school libraries to buy textbooks and other instructional materials and provided for educational research, among other things. Essentially, the Federal government took over the education of the children, according to Carbone.

Carbone writes: “Representative Charles Goodell warned that the bill’s ‘clear intent is to radically change our historic structure of education by a dramatic shift of power to the federal level.’”

The National Education Association (NEA) teacher’s union, a supporter of Democrat candidates and causes, opposes any and all efforts to inject competition or reform into the failing schools. Therefore Democrats oppose them as well. Combined with local teacher unions, the NEA also fights efforts to change the tenure system which protects the jobs of bad teachers to the detriment of the children.

LBJ’s War on Poverty programs have been dismal failures. According to Carbone in Slaying Leviathan, $800 million was appropriated for the Economic Opportunity Bill of 1964. That bill created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and 10 other programs. The next year Congress appropriated $1.5 billion for OEO. Between 1965 and 1972 Congress spent $15 billion on the War on Poverty.

“Launching the War Poverty, Johnson declared, ‘[T]he days of the dole are numbered.’ Within two generations, more than $10 trillion have been spent on this war, more in current dollars than was spent to win World War II,” Carbone writes.

And through all that, Democrats are still looking for ways to spend money to fund programs to fight the War on Poverty.

Obama And Echoes Of FDR
Like Herbert Hoover, George W. Bush was a Republican without a conservative soul. And just like Hoover, his policies to battle the recession were all wrong. First was the stimulus bill of 2008, a $150 billion—1 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP)—kick in the economy through tax rebate checks that the government hoped would prevent or shorten the recession.

Next came the $700 billion Emergency Economic Stabilization Act and Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free market,” Bush said at the time.

Then Obama went one better than Bush. Just two months after taking office he pushed through Congress a $787 billion American Recover and Reinvestment Act of 2009. So within the space of one year more than $1.5 million new dollars had been injected into the economy, further eroding the value of the dollars the poor and middle class hold.

What’s more, as Michael Barone writes for The Washington Examiner, “One-third of the 2009 stimulus money went to state and local governments–an obvious payoff to the public employee unions which gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Democrats and got hundreds of billions of dollars in return, to insulate public employee unions from the effects of the recession which has affected everyone else.”

There’s another provision in the bill that provides a sop to unions. The money for “shovel ready” construction projects must be spent on firms using union labor. This raises the cost of the projects and freezes out many non-union poor or middle class construction workers.

But Obama wasn’t finished. Despite the call from the American people to focus on jobs and the economy, Obama and his Congressional allies were single-mindedly pushing through an unconstitutional healthcare program which will cost $940 billion, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.

Touted as a bill to help the uninsured, it’s not likely to make things better. For one thing, those 32 million new patients are going to be trying to get appointments with the same number of—or fewer—doctors than we currently have. What’s more, the plan cuts Medicare payments and puts mandates on the states to cover more people under Medicaid—the program that insures the poor. This comes at a time when state budgets are in crisis.

Plus, many doctors already refuse to take Medicare and Medicaid patients because the reimbursement is so low. With fewer doctors for fewer patients, that means rationed care. And the poor and middle class, who are unable to afford to pay out of pocket for a doctor’s care, will be the victims of rationed care.

And then there are the tax increases in the bill. According to Bloomberg.com the bill imposes about $69 billion in penalties for individuals and businesses who don’t meet mandates to buy insurance.

And The Hill newspaper reports that the Joint Committee on Taxation, congress’ official score keeper, says the new law will cost taxpayers earning less than $200,000 a year roughly $3.9 billion more in taxes—in 2019 alone—by limiting the medical expense deduction.

On top of this are the taxes on pharmaceutical companies, medical manufacturers and insurance companies which will be passed on to the consumer.

Finally, the healthcare bill will affect smaller rural communities with physician-owned hospitals. According to CNSNews.com, “The new health care overhaul law, which promised increased access and efficiency in health care, will prevent doctor-owned hospitals from adding more rooms and more beds.”

Physician-owned hospitals have higher patient satisfaction, greater control over medical decisions for patients and doctor, better quality care and lower costs, according to Physician Hospitals of America, as quoted by CNSNews.com

The Coming Value-Added Tax
Obama economic advisor and former Federal Reserve Chief Paul Volcker recently suggested that it’s time for America to adopt a value-added tax (VAT). The White House immediately downplayed the idea. Then last week Obama admitted he was on board.

“I know that there’s been a lot of talk around town lately about the value-added tax. That is something that has worked for some countries. It’s something that would be novel for the United States,” Obama told CNBC.

After Volcker’s remarks the Senate passed a nonbinding “sense of the Senate” resolution that calls such a tax “a massive tax increase that will cripple families on fixed income and only further push back America’s economic recovery.”

With the Tea Partiers already incensed over the administration’s policies and Congress’ actions, a VAT is not on the table before the November elections. But it’s coming. You can count on it. After all, it’s European, and Obama is hell-bent on turning American into a European socialist country.

The VAT is a sales tax that is added onto every product at each stage of production. It is a regressive tax that inordinately affects the poor and middle class.

In Slaying Leviathan, Carbone writes: “…the VAT has been disastrous in Europe. As a hidden tax, it is easy to raise and has continually increased. Its complicated nature expands government and makes it expensive to administer. A VAT forces businesses to bear heavy compliance costs in order to serve as tax collectors for the government.”

Food and some necessities are often exempted from the VAT, which helps the consumer but not the business which has to administer it. Combine that with the fact that sometimes many different rates are applied, and the cost of compliance inordinately affects small businesses on which many families depend and which employ the most people, according to Carbone.

In the end, all the VAT will do is grow government and give it more money to spend to further encroach on the lives of Americans while crushing the economy.

Of course, growing government and creating a cycle of dependency is the goal of the Democrats. Party of the working man (or woman)? Not hardly. Not even old yellow dogs lying under the porch waiting for handouts thrive under Democrat policies.

The double standard that is liberalism apparently knows no bounds, for now liberal pundits are effectively calling prominent conservatives criminals because of their disagreement with the policies of the Barack Obama administration.

On NBC’s The Chris Matthews Show on April 18, Time columnist Joe Klein all but accused former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Fox News’ Glenn Beck of sedition.

“I did a little bit of research just before this show—it’s on the napkin here. I looked up the definition of sedition which is conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of the state. And a lot of these statements, especially the ones coming from people like Glenn Beck and to a certain extent Sarah Palin, rub right up close to being seditious.”

According to Klein, the legal definition of sedition is “a revolt or an incitement to revolt against established authority.”

John Heilemann one-upped Klein, invoking the name of Rush Limbaugh as someone else who is seditious, because he calls the Obama administration the Obama regime.

So that’s where we are now in the political discourse?

Prior to and during the Revolutionary War, many of our Founding Fathers spoke and wrote privately and publicly about the tyranny of the British government. Today, we consider them heroes. To the British they were seditious.

In the 1960s blacks and some whites marched and held peaceful demonstrations—despite violent efforts to silence them—in order to secure equal rights for the black race. Today we consider them heroes. To many, they were seditious.

In the 1970s a group of radical students with communist ideologies bombed 25 sites in the United States—including the Pentagon—and murdered two New York police officers and Brinks truck driver in a botched robbery attempt. They were called The Weather Underground, and their manifesto said, “Our aim is to disrupt the empire… to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks.”

Was that sedition?

One of the members of that group is William Ayers. He’s an Obama mentor and in all likelihood the ghost author of Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

During the administration of George W. Bush, liberal activists protested Bush’s every move. A play was even written and performed which celebrated Bush’s assassination. Sedition? None of the liberal media thought so.

But speak out against the Marxist redistributionist policies of the Obama administration and call it a regime—as liberal pundits did to Bush during his administration—and you are somehow being seditious.

Thomas Jefferson once said, “I tolerate with the utmost latitude the right of others to differ from me in opinion without imputing to them criminality.”

Liberals apparently can’t do that. Of course the reason and wisdom of Jefferson and the rest of Founders is as foreign to today’s liberals as the reasoning behind Mao Zedong’s murderous policies is to conservatives.

Perhaps that’s why political discourse has taken such an ugly turn.

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(Part one of a two-part series)

Democrats have long practiced the politics of envy. They preach that their policies help the working man (or woman) whereas the Republicans are the party of the rich.

They like to try and pit the poor against the rich. They promote the notion that if someone earns more than whatever Democrats consider a “living wage” (a despicable term) then that person is somehow evil. And many Americans have fallen for it.

Well, truth be told, both parties have done much more to benefit the rich than the poor. Some of the reasons for that are outlined here.

But how Democrats have managed to maintain the myth that their policies are beneficial to Average Working-class Joe (or Jane) is one of the great mysteries of all time—ranking up there with quasars and how Joe Besser ever became one of the Three Stooges. For Democrat big-government policies have been devastating to the “working” man.

Consider the actions of the 28th President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson. With the help of a Democrat-controlled Congress, Wilson established the Federal Reserve in 1913 and instituted an income tax which necessitated the establishment of the Bureau of Internal Revenue—the precursor to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

These agencies began the stealth system of “legal” theft from the American people and put us on a fiat paper money dollar system. This means that all who earn dollars and save dollars have depreciating currency with depreciating assets.

This system hurts the poor more than it does the rich. How? As the Federal Reserve prints more and more money, the currency depreciates. Depreciating currency (inflation of prices) slowly reduces the value of their savings and their standard of living. The poor—and the middle class—who often find themselves living hand-to-mouth see a rise in the prices of the things they buy. Since a greater portion of their wealth is spent on living expenses, inflation affects the poor and middle class far more than the rich.

The purpose of fiat paper money is a tax on the population which doesn’t have to be collected or enforced. The state simply has to inflate the currency by printing more paper money. The people are slow to realize the sinister purpose of inflating the currency.

Inflation or depreciation of the currency is a monetary plague that attacks the spenders and the savers. Your wealth is taken without a gun to your head.

Writing in his book, End the Fed, Ron Paul quotes from data from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis that shows how money has depreciated:

“One only needs to reflect on the dramatic decline in the value of the dollar that has taken place since the Fed was established in 1913. The goods and services you could buy for $1.00 in 1913 now cost nearly $21.00. Another way to look at this is from the perspective of the purchasing power of the dollar itself. It has fallen to less than $0.05 of its 1913 value. We might say that the government and its banking cartel have together stolen $0.95 of every dollar as they have pursued a relentlessly inflationary policy.”

That’s the tax that doesn’t have to be collected. The one that is collected is just as insidious.

According to U.S. Census data, the average annual income in 1915 was $687. That year—as in 1913 when the income tax was enacted—there were just seven income tax brackets. The marginal tax rate was 1 percent for people making up to $20,000. The highest rate was 7 percent on income above $500,000.

In 2008, according to Leslie Carbone in her book, Slaying Leviathan, The Moral Case for Tax Reform, a married couple filing jointly paid 10 percent on the first $16,050 of their taxable income, 15 percent on the remainder up to $65,100, 25 percent on the remainder up to $131,450, 28 percent on the remainder up to $200,300, 33 percent on the remainder up to $357,700, and 35 percent on the rest.

That means that if you work and you are one of the 53 percent of Americans who actually pay income taxes, you spend somewhere between one to three hours each day working to pay your tax burden.

The Great Depression And The New Deal
The Roaring ‘20s were arguably the most prosperous decade in American history, writes Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D., in his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to The Great Depression and The New Deal. It wasn’t just that people grew richer. Their lives changed with the growth in the automobile and the spread of electricity and invention of gadgets and appliances that ran off it.

Meanwhile, the Fed was flooding the credit markets with cheap money which led to a speculative bubble that burst in 1929, according to Murphy. On Oct. 28, 1929, the stock market lost almost 13 percent of its value. The next day saw a drop of almost 12 percent. The Great Depression was on.

Unemployment soared, surpassing 28 percent in March 1933. Annual production dropped 27 percent. Republican President Herbert Hoover’s policies didn’t help. Murphy writes:

“The shocking unemployment rates of the Hoover years were a direct, if unintended consequence of his high-wage policy. Hoover urged businesses to maintain wage rates, even though profits were plummeting and prices in general were dropping. With firms desperately trying to cut costs to stay afloat during the Depression, Hoover insisted that the relative price of labor increase. It is no wonder then that this period witnessed the sharpest pullback in demand for workers in American history. FDR continued these policies.” [Emphasis in original text]

Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, like Hoover before him, thought the Depression was caused by underconsumption, according to Murphy. So he sought to raise wage rates (rather than put a floor under them) and he pushed industrial and labor policies through Congress that limited competition and raised labor bargaining power.

Murphy writes:

“One of these policies was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) (1933-35). This act created the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which provided a vehicle for the major players in each industry to create a so-called ‘Code of Fair Competition.’ In reality, these codes were anti-competitive rules that forbade industries from lowering prices. In short, the NRA worked by fostering giant cartels, which made products artificially expensive and punished small businesses trying to compete against big businesses. As a condition for being allowed to form such a cartel, Roosevelt insisted that each participating ‘industry [raise] wages and [accept] collective bargaining with an independent union.’ By 1934, over 500 industries had adopted such codes, covering almost 80 percent of private, nonfarm employment. With these ‘voluntary’ codes in place, big producers could raise prices without fear of losing market share, because the federal government itself would punish any ‘unpatriotic’ upstarts who dared try to undersell large firms.” [Emphasis in original text]

With small businesses unable to set their own prices lower, not only were they unable to compete with larger business, but poor and middle-class citizens were unable to shop around for a good price or purchase as much as they needed.

In 1935 the Supreme Court threw out the NIRA as unconstitutional so Roosevelt used the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to achieve his goals, according to Murphy. The NLRA granted unions incredible bargaining power by forcing businesses to accept collective bargaining. As a result, union membership more than doubled and the number of “strike days” doubled in one year—from 14 million in 1936 to 28 million in 1937. This surge in union strength—and the high wages it brought—was an important factor in the persistently high unemployment rates of the 1930s. In other words, FDR’s pro-union policies helped prevent people from finding jobs.

Other “highlights” of FDR’s policies that hurt the poor and middle class*:

• The four-day banking holiday closed all banks—even those that were sound—denying depositors access to their own money. It was mostly small regional banks that failed and they did so mostly because of government intervention in the banking system. The “solution” did not correct the fundamental problems with the banks, but instead took away bank clients’ incentives to monitor bank solvency by saddling taxpayers with losses.

• The executive order requiring American citizens to surrender all gold certificates and gold, except for rare gold coins, in exchange for Federal Reserve Notes was outright theft. The government compounded the problem when it tied the dollar back to gold—changing the exchange rate from $20.67 per ounce to $35 per ounce (a 40 percent depreciation).

• Under government coercion, sellers destroyed food in order to raise prices (as depicted in scenes from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath). While hundreds of thousands of poor and unemployed people went hungry, farmers were plowing their crops under, or leaving them to rot in the field, and slaughtering livestock to comply with the Agriculture Adjustment Act. “[While Agriculture Secretary Henry A.] Wallace was paying out hundreds of millions to kill hogs, burn oats, plow under cotton, the Department of Agriculture issued a bulletin telling the nation that the great problems of our time was our failure to produce enough food.”

• The Works Process Administration (WPA) hampered the economic recovery. By giving the unemployed an option that paid well enough, the WPA siphoned workers away from truly productive tasks that would have restored the economy to a long-run sustainable condition. In other words, the government paid them not to find a job.

There are many New Deal programs that still exist to this day, though few of them really help the “working man.” One of the worst is Social Security. In Slaying Leviathan, Carbone writes:

“Former Social Security Commissioner Stanford Ross criticized the founders of Social Security for generating public support by advancing the fictitious belief that a worker ‘pays for’ benefits with ‘contributions’ rather than taxes, and has an ‘earned right’ to particular benefits. Ross advised Americans to reject the ‘myth’ that Social Security is a pension plan and accept it as a tax on workers to provide for the ‘vulnerable in our society’.

“Senator Patrick Moynihan went further, calling Social Security taxes ‘outright thievery’ from young working people.”

All in all, Democrat policies during the first half of the 20th Century did much more to hurt the working poor or middle class than to help. This is not to absolve Republicans of responsibility. They were complicit in that they didn’t do enough to try and stop the practices before they were implemented, nor have they done much to try and repeal them. Republicans like big government as much as the Democrats.

The fallacy is that either party, the Democrats in particular, have been able to position themselves as the party of the “working” man.

* From The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to The Great Depression and the New Deal, by Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D.

(Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part series on Democrat big government policies and how they hurt the people they are supposed to help. Next week will focus on Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society and the policies of Barack Hussein Obama, including Obamacare and the coming value-added tax.)