In the Shadows of Promise - The New American Magazine - 8-31-09.pdf

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August 31, 2009

In the

Promise Shadows

of

Evaluating Obama’s Campaign Pledges

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First Ten Amendments to the ConstitutionArticle I. Congress shall make no law respect-ing an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Article II. A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Article III. No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Article IV. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirma-tion, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Article V. No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or

property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Article VI. In all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtain-ing witnesses in his favor, and to have the assis-tance of counsel for his defense.

Article VII. In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Article VIII. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Article IX. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Article X. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respec-tively, or to the people.

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Cover Story

Politics

10 in the shadows of Promiseby Thomas R. Eddlem — Evaluating Obama’s Campaign Pledges.

FeatureS

terrorism

17 No state sponsors, No terrorby William F. Jasper — For 30 years Iran has been the leading state sponsor of global terror — with Syria, Cuba, and North Korea as helpmates. But behind them have been the terror masters of the Soviet KGB, and its renamed successor, the Russian FSB.

NatioNal iD

23 “ Your Papers, Please!”by Becky Akers — Though REAL ID implementation stalled, its twin, PASS ID, seems to be gaining traction because the federal government is poised to fund the mandate.

Book review

29 exposing the Green world orderby James Perloff — Steve Milloy, the founder of junkscience.com, makes a case that Americans are on a “green” slide toward authoritarian regulations and pauperism.

HistorY — Past aND PersPective

35 sousa’s march of Greatnessby John White — John Philip Sousa’s entire life was devoted to music; hence, it is no surprise that his legacy in music lives on.

tHe last worD

44 why is “cash for clunkers” called a success?by Gary Benoit

17

23

35

DepartmentS

5 letters to the editor

6 inside track

9 QuickQuotes

33 the Goodness of america

39 exercising the right

41 correction, Please!

10

vol. 25, No. 18 august 31, 2009

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carlin’s report isn’t scienceThe August 3 issue of The New AmericAN claimed that a report, purporting to show that the Earth is not warming because of CO2, by EPA research analyst Alan Carlin was suppressed. I am very surprised people think the Carlin report was “suppressed.” I favor holding career government employ-ees to standards. On several other websites, people have documented that Alan Carlin’s “report” was lifted, in many cases without attribution, from other blogs. He does not rely on peer-reviewed, scientific literature — something that the Bush OMB (more specifically, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under John Graham) codified in guidance to all agencies and still remains in effect today. (See OMB circular A-4 and its guidance on peer review.) In-deed, the Sensenbrenner Science Commit-tee also issued a report in 1992 that argued that regulatory agencies need to rely on peer-reviewed science.

So when an economist writes (or should I say lifts) a report from nonpeer-reviewed sources, the EPA manager should just let it go forward? Government agencies shouldn’t have any scientific standards? Any career government employee should be permitted to write whatever they want and force other agency scientists to spend time (and our tax dollars) responding? You do not think career employees should be held to standards? I am quite certain that any agency analyst can always find some-thing on a blog somewhere that supports their point of view. Some comments on the online version of the article imply that fed-eral employees should be free to lift that blog material, put their office’s imprimatur on it, and then forward it to the work-group that is responsible for the regulation (or is that just for employees who don’t think cli-mate change is a problem?). That of course would take valuable work time of other federal employees to respond. Maybe you missed the recent release by the Department of Commerce’s NOAA, but the combined ocean and land temp for this past month is the second hottest on record (since 1880). Ocean temps have never been higher. See http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/sto-ries2009/20090717_juneglobalstats.html.

Tom wAlls

submitted via e-mail

The reader might find it very informative to actually read the well-referenced report. http://www.carlineconomics.com/files/pdf/end_comments_7b1.pdf He would see that Carlin’s purpose was not to prove what did or did not cause the Earth to warm in the 1990s; it was to warn the EPA of the gross errors in IPCC pronouncements and to show that CO2 lagged in third place as a possible climate-forcing agent behind ocean current oscillations and solar irra-diance. If the reader doesn’t think the re-port was suppressed, he might explain an e-mail from Carlin’s superiors: “The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round.” In other words, let us blindly follow the Gore and Han-sen strategy of decrying that “the debate is over.” And by the way, Ph.D. economist (MIT) Carlin also has a degree in physics from arguably the toughest undergraduate school in the nation, Cal Tech.

Also, the reader is trying to refute evi-dence of global cooling using temperatures taken only from the month of June. June was indeed hot. The Weather Service in Little Rock reported it 2.80oF above normal. July, however, was 4.00oF below normal. The real question is not temperature anomalies such as that measured in June. Nor even the fact that a network of 3,175 bathythermograph buoys have found that the heat content of the ocean has been dropping for the last five years. The question is, “What is causing the fluctuation in global temperatures?” And more specifi-cally, why are atmospheric and surface tem-peratures going down when CO2 is increasing at a higher-than-expected rate? — Ed.

Send your letters to: The New AmericAN, P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54912. Or e-mail: [email protected]. Due to vol-ume received, not all letters can be answered. Letters may be edited for space and clarity.

Publisher John F. McManus

Editor Gary Benoit

Senior Editor William F. Jasper

Associate Editor Kurt Williamsen

Contributors Dennis J. Behreandt

Christopher S. Bentley Steven J. DuBord

Selwyn Duke Jodie Gilmore

Gregory A. Hession, J.D. Ed Hiserodt

William P. Hoar R. Cort Kirkwood

Warren Mass Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Alan Scholl Ann Shibler

Liana Stanley Michael E. Telzrow

Joe Wolverton II, J.D.

Editorial Assistant Denise L. Behreandt

Art Director Joseph W. Kelly

Research Bonnie M. Gillis

Marketing Larry Greenley

Public Relations Bill Hahn

Advertising/Circulation Julie DuFrane

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Rates are $39 per year (Hawaii and Canada, add $9; foreign, add $27) or $22 for six months (Hawaii and Canada, add $4.50; foreign, add $13.50). Copyright ©2009 by American Opin-ion Publishing, Inc. Periodicals postage paid at Appleton, WI and additional mailing offices. Post-master: Send any address changes to The New AmericAN, P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54912.

The New AmericAN is pub-lished biweekly by Ameri-can Opinion Publishing

Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of The John Birch Society.

correctioN: In the history article for August 17 entitled “Browning: One Man’s Impact,” we mistakenly said that John Browning’s A-5 autoloading shot-gun and a line of semiautomatic pistols created by him were gas-operated. They were not. Each of these guns had a singularly unique method of ejecting a spent shell and reloading a new one — more proof of Browning’s genius.

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

A recent study by the Federation for American Immigration Re-form determined that healthcare reform would not have any real barriers against illegal immigrants enrolling in the taxpayer-fund-ed public option, and that there would be no verification system to stop illegals from receiving credits to purchase private plans.

The Center for Immigration Studies has put the number of illegal immigrants who do not have health insurance at 7.25 mil-lion. More than half of these — about four million — are prob-ably employed, said Steven Camarota, a research director with the center. Camarota believes that it could cost anywhere from $8 billion to $12 billion annually to provide these illegal immi-grants with insurance coverage, but there are many variables in the equation.

For one thing, Camarota’s estimate doesn’t include covering children. It also assumes all four million had no benefits from their employers to begin with, which doesn’t take into account that some would have already received emergency-room treat-ment at the public’s expense. Some of the four million would likely be too afraid of being caught to enroll in an insurance plan, and some would actually be paying taxes, so they wouldn’t be freeloading.

Nonetheless, Camarota maintains that, at the very least, the healthcare plans now being proposed on Capitol Hill would almost certainly make things worse by allowing employers to force taxpayers to foot the bill for their illegal employees’ healthcare. “Illegal immigra-tion kind of looms as the 800-pound gorilla,” Camarota said. “The impact is really big.” This is because the reform proposals fail to admit there is a problem. “The legislation says illegal im-migrants are not supposed to get this plan, but it also guts any of the mechanisms that would leave them out — typical Washington kind of thing.”

It is worth pointing out that while illegal immigrants are not supposed to be covered by President Barack Obama’s reform pro-posals, he always includes them when stating how many millions of “Americans” are uninsured.

illegal immigrants likely covered Under Democrats’ Healthcare reform

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking at a town hall meeting at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, on August 6, said it was “a great regret but it is a fact” that the United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC). “But we have supported the court and continue to do so,” Clinton said.

The ICC was set up in 2002 as the world’s first per-manent war-crimes court, and claims the authority to try individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The United States, Rus-sia, China, and Israel have not ratified it.

The Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics’ official un-employment rate actually shrunk from 9.5 percent to 9.4 percent, even though the U.S. economy lost an additional 247,000 jobs in July.

How can the job market shed nearly a quarter million jobs and the jobless rate still be lower?

It is likely that Secretary Clinton and the Obama administra-tion are fond of the ICC because it can be used to threaten tin-pot dictators who don’t kowtow to Western elites. Even though the United States has never ratified the treaty, Clinton held the ICC threateningly above the heads of Kenya’s leaders when telling them how to run their criminal justice program: “I have urged that the Kenyan government find the way forward themselves,” she said. “But if not, then the names turned over to the I.C.C. will be opened, and an investigation will begin.”

The New York Times reported that Clinton was referring to a list of Kenyans that former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan handed to the International Criminal Court in a sealed envelope in July. In other words, Kenya’s leaders will bow to mandates from Westerners or Kenya’s leaders may find themselves before the ICC facing long prison sentences for various crimes.

The fact that Americans enjoy protections as a result of our Constitution does not alter the fact that U.S. ratification of the ICC treaty would threaten those guarantees.

The answer can be found in the fact that more and more Ameri-cans are leaving the job market entirely. The BLS explained: “The civilian labor force participation rate declined by 0.2 percentage point in July to 65.5 percent.” American families are increasingly deciding to go back to school or trying to make do on a single income, according to statistics.

clinton wields and Praises the international criminal court

Unemployment Up; Unemployment Figures Down

Clinton in Nairobi

Inside Track

6 THE NEW AMERICAN • AugusT 31, 2009

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Earlier this month, the White House un-veiled a new section of its website called “Reality Check,” which retails stale Obama talking points on healthcare and also included a snitch line for Obama supporters to inform the White House on opponents of Obamacare. The snitch line, also unveiled on the White House blog, asked: “Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to [email protected].”

The obvious concern is that the new snitch line will enable the Obama administration to build an “enemies list,” just as Richard Nixon did during his stay in the White House.

The problem with Obama’s snitch line is that it violates the

federal Privacy Act of 1974, which Con-gress passed in an attempt to avoid another Nixon-style “enemies list.” Former judge and Fox News Channel commentator An-drew Napolitano explained that the White House has put itself into a legal conundrum on this issue. “There’s also a statute that requires the White House to retain all com-munications that it receives. It can’t try to rewrite history by pretending it didn’t re-ceive anything,” Napolitano told Fox News on August 7. “If the White House deletes anything, it violates one statute. If the White House collects data on the free speech, it vio-lates another statute.”

The White House quietly took down their snitch line at “Reality Check” over the August 8-9 weekend, but the original snitch line message on the White House blog has not been removed as of this writing.

obama’s “snitch line” violates the Federal Privacy act

Dr. John Goodman’s Health Policy Blog for July 22 makes clear the harsh reality that the only way for President Barack Obama’s version of healthcare reform “to control health care costs is to get doctors to provide less care — fewer tests, fewer procedures, fewer everything.” And who gets the least health-care of all? Senior citizens.

What is the basis for these allegations of biased healthcare ra-tioning? Dr. Goodman cites none other than White House health-care policy adviser Ezekiel Emanuel. “Allocation by age is not invidious discrimination,” Emanuel wrote in the January 31 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet. “Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years.” So because everyone would get an equal chance to be favored when they are young, they would be equally discriminated against when they are old. “Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist,” Emanuel maintains, but “treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.”

Emanuel is advocating here the complete-lives system, which

allocates medical care first to those who have not yet lived a “complete” life — however that is defined — prioritizing those who have the greatest potential to live a complete life in the fu-ture. He notes that “broad consensus favours adolescents over very young infants, and young adults over the very elderly peo-ple,” because “the complete lives system assumes that, although life-years are equally valuable to all, justice requires the fair dis-tribution of them.”

Dr. Goodman points out how this all fits with current reform proposals. “Buried somewhere in the 1,000 plus pages” of Capi-tol Hill legislation “is a provision to severely limit what Medicare pays for CT and MRI scans performed in doctors’ offices. This would force elderly patients, for example, to go to the hospi-tal for their radiology — where there are often lengthy waits.” The elderly, who frequently have difficulty with mobility, will be stuck making another long and arduous trip to the hospital when their needs could have been met in one visit to the doctor’s of-fice. Some will put off or outright refuse this hassle that younger people are better able to endure.

USA Today reported on July 17 that many medical profession-als are issuing stern warnings against a reduction in office-based imaging. “It’s something that’s going to affect patients dearly, I’m afraid,” said Steven Harms, a radiologist at the Breast Center of Northwest Arkansas. “There are a lot of small towns (where doctors) are doing CTs and MRIs, and I don’t think they’re going to be able to stay in business.”

This is Obama’s vision for healthcare reform. Instead of undo-ing the managed-care system the government is responsible for and allowing the free market to compete at providing affordable, quality care, Obama’s proposals would implement Emanuel’s model of rationing. n

Healthcare reform Biased against seniors

Obama, at a “town hall” meeting with the American Association of Retired Persons, tries to sell seniors on his healthcare plan.

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obamacare shocker: send in the social workers

The proposed Obama government health-care bill has a government snitch net-

work built into it, allowing social workers to gain access to your home under the pretext of checking on your new baby, or soon-to-be-born baby. It will result in many, many more children being taken from families by state Child Protective Services agencies.

This is the fulfillment of a long-held dream by child protection agencies to gain access to homes, without first getting a report of abuse or neglect, as currently required by law. Mandated visits to homes by government agents has been a favorite cause of Hillary Clinton, and of the radical bureaucrats running the U.S. Admin-istration of Children and Families.

This “home invasion” program is found on page 838 of the lengthy bill, in Section 1904, and it is called the “Home visitation programs for families with young children and families expecting children.” The pretext on which the state agents would enter the home would be “to improve the well-being, health, and develop-ment of children by enabling the establishment and expansion of high quality programs providing voluntary home visitation for families with young children and families expecting children.” It sounds pretty innocuous, but based on my 15 years of fighting these bureaucrats in court on behalf of innocent families, it can be predicted that the way it will work in real life will be much more sinister.

Visits from the bureaucrats are voluntary in theory. (However, so are income taxes.) Here is how it would work: after your first ap-pointment with your OB/GYN to confirm a pregnancy, the doctor would be required to report it to the leviathan healthcare bureaucra-cy. If you somehow fall through the cracks during the pregnancy, the birth hospital will do the honors of reporting you to the State. Then, chirpy social workers will show up at your house one day, and pressure you to allow them to come “voluntarily” into your house. These people are so-called “mandated reporters,” who must report any abuse or neglect, or potentially face fines and jail.

Certain populations will be targeted for this “help,” and this should raise even more concern. Here is what the bill says: “The State shall identify and prioritize serving communities that are in high need of such services, especially communities with a high proportion of low-income families or a high incidence of child maltreatment.” Translated, this means that poor and racial minority communities will be targeted, since they are more vulnerable and they cannot as readily access legal muscle to repel the invaders.

Once into your home, they will look around and find some-thing, anything, to call “abuse” or “neglect.” Their jobs depend on it, and you can be sure that the managers will set quotas, which will never be acknowledged. Then, they will open a case with a child protective services agency, and give you “services,” whether you like it or not. In cases that they judge to be more serious, they will likely ask their legal department to bring a court case and possibly remove the children.

This is a backdoor means of obtaining agreement to go around the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and similar provi-sions in most state constitutions that prohibit entry into a home without a search warrant. If you agree to having social workers enter your house, then you have waived your right to require a search warrant, which can only be authorized by a magistrate or judge on probable cause that a crime has or is being committed.

This part of the Obama healthcare bill is terrifying, and the numbers of children taken from families, as well as those who will have to endure weekly or monthly visits from a social worker, would increase manyfold if this part of the bill were to become law. This conclusion is not speculative, as it is the whole reason for mandating these visits to homes in the first place. If the child-services industry did not expect to kidnap more children and to open many more administrative cases, the provision would not be there. n

— GreGory A. hessioN

The above article is the first installment in an online series by Massachusetts attorney Gregory A. Hession, who specializes in family and constitutional law, examining various fine-print pro-visions of the proposed 1,017-page Obama healthcare bill that would deprive Americans of rights, or are of particular concern owing to their likely intrusion on personal privacy or family au-tonomy. Please go to thenewamerican.com frequently to view these articles, as well as other articles on the general subject of Obama’s healthcare plan. (These articles are grouped together under “U.S. News” in the “Health Care” category.)


Extended Inside Track

President Doesn’t like opposition to His Healthcare Proposal“They are filling the airwaves and the Internet with outrageous false-hoods to scare people into opposing change. So we’ve got to get out there, fight lies with truth, and set the record straight.”In his August 5 message sent to supporters via the Internet, Barack Obama aimed some very strong accusations at activists who don’t want his government-mandated healthcare.

top British Diplomat sees His country in long afghan struggle“We’re going to have a very long commitment. This is not just one year; this is going to be for decades. We’re going to help them get to

a state in which they can ward off the return of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”Speaking in Boston, Britain’s Ambassador to the United States Nigel Steinwald claimed that his coun-trymen were evenly divided about keeping forces in Afghanistan even as casualties mounted.

He wants to Break Up the Fed“The Obama administration’s plan to increase the powers of the Federal Reserve, says one critic, is like giving a teenager a bigger, faster car right after he crashed the family station wagon.... What we need now is a debate about how to break up the Fed — and some of the sprawling financial institutions it supervises.”A visiting scholar at Harvard, Columbia University professor Amar Bhide is writing a book about the financial crisis.

chinese official sends a warning about U.s. indebtedness“We sincerely hope the U.S. fiscal deficit will be reduced year after year. First and foremost our respon-sibility is the Chinese people, so of course we are concerned about the security of Chinese assets.”Speaking to reporters in Washington, Chinese Assistant Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao registered growing concern about the $801 billion in U.S. debt owned by China.

a Black columnist scorches obama for His remark“Those who were shocked at President Obama’s cheap shot at the Cambridge police for being ‘stupid’ in arresting Henry Louis Gates must have been among those who let their wishes prevail over the obvious implications of Obama’s 20 years of association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Anyone who can believe that Obama did not understand what the racist rants of Jeremiah Wright meant can believe anything.”Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell wasn’t surprised that the president let his racism show in the aftermath of the confrontation.

congressional report Blasts acorN“ACORN hides behind a paper wall of nonprofit corporate protec-tions to conceal a criminal conspiracy on the part of its directors, to launder federal money in order to pursue a political agenda and to manipulate the American electorate.”In a report commissioned by Representative Darrell Issa (R-Ca-lif.), the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform expressed outrage that ACORN could receive $8.5 billion in federal stimulus funds.

House accedes to obama’s wish for abortion in D.c.“President Obama’s decision to force American taxpayers to foot the bill for abortions in the District of Columbia will cause the deaths of at least 1,000 more unborn children each year.”After the House acted favorably on the president’s budget request to repeal the Dornan Amendment, which has barred federal funding of abortion in the district for decades, Marjorie Dannenfelser of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List lamented Congress’ callousness toward life and its misuse of taxpayer money. n

— compiled by JohN F. mcmANus

Thomas Sowell

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QuickQuotes

9

Barack Obama

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by Thomas R. Eddlem

President Barack Obama took office with an extraordinary set of prom-ises as a candidate. He has fulfilled

many of the promises to the left-wing base of his party, such as his executive order three days after he was inaugurated restor-ing the funding of abortions with foreign-

aid money. But how has he done with the popular campaign promises he made to middle America, the promises that got him elected? Candidate Obama pledged to cut taxes for the middle class, lower overall taxes, cut government spending, reduce the deficit, cut the cost of health-care waste, eliminate most government secrecy, and reform ethics at the White

House. Here is a review of these domestic policy promises in the categories of eth-ics, transparency in government, and fiscal responsibility, along with an assessment of how earnestly they were carried out.

Thomas R. Eddlem, a freelance writer, served as the

John Birch Society’s director of research from 1991-

2000.

THE NEW AMERICAN • AugusT 31, 200910

Politics

In the

Promise Shadows

of

Evaluating Obama’s Campaign Pledges

No lobbyists Funding His campaign Promise: “I have done more than any other candidate in this race to take on lob-byists — and won. They have not funded my campaign.” (Barack Obama, Speech in Des Moines, Iowa, November 10, 2007)

Track Record: The independent watchdog group SourceWatch.org found that lobbyists had funded Obama’s Sen-ate campaign, as well as his presidential campaign from the beginning. By the time Obama had made the statement above, it was already false. Public Citizen had al-ready listed nine different lobbyists who had contributed to the Obama campaign, in addition to “bundling” individual con-tributions averaging more than $100,000 each to Obama’s presidential campaign during 2007. During the 2008 campaign, Obama accepted bundled contributions of nearly one million dollars ($997,095) from Goldman Sachs executives, the same firm that received tens of billions in bail-out funds through the TARP legislation Obama backed in September 2008.

Obama later backtracked, claiming that lobbyists who funded him didn’t impact his decisions. Of course, this is the same claim all politicians who take money from lobbyists make.

Verdict: Outright Lie

No more executive Branch electioneeringPromise: “Remove the use of public of-fice for partisan advantage: Public office should not be used to advance political in-terests. Too often federal workers dismiss

the law that governs political activity, both because of political incentives not to use it and because of inadequate enforcement mechanisms. As president, Barack Obama will issue an Executive Order banning the use of public office to further partisan ad-vantage in political elections.” (“Taking Back Our Government” pamphlet on Ba-rackObama.com)

Track Record: Obama issued an “ethics” executive order, but it omitted mention of banning use of the executive branch for partisan purposes. Partisan use of public office begins at the top in the Obama White House. Obama orches-trated a partisan political pressure ma-neuver using his cabinet secretaries on July 13, getting four cabinet secretaries to write on government stationery to Ari-zona Governor Janice Brewer to pressure Republican Arizona Senator Jon Kyl to stop criticizing Obama’s “stimulus” law. Kyl had suggested on nationwide televi-sion days earlier that the “stimulus” bill didn’t work and that all uncommitted projects from the “stimulus” bill ought to be stopped in order to prevent increasing the deficit further. Transportation Sec-retary Ray LaHood sarcastically wrote to Brewer, “If you prefer to forfeit the money we are making available to your state, as Senator Kyl suggests, please let me know.” Interior Secretary Ken Sala-zar wrote an almost identical line, except he omitted Kyl’s name: “If you prefer to forfeit the money we are making avail-able to Arizona, please let me know.” Agriculture Secretary Vilsack and HUD

Secretary Donovan also wrote letters to Brewer. “It was a thinly veiled threat,” Kyl told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren. “And they combined that with some ads that the Democrat campaign committee ran on their website, and so on.”


Political appointees with close ties to industry Promise: “No political appointees in an Obama Administration will be permitted to work on regulations or contracts direct-ly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years. A two-year ban will remove the incentive to employers to provide some sort of financial incentive, such as [a] generous severance package, to an employee leaving for a government job with an agency that regulates them.” (“Taking Back Our Government” pam-phlet on BarackObama.com)

Track Record: Obama broke this promise within three days of taking office. He nominated former Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn as deputy secretary of de-fense on January 23. Raytheon is a major military contractor for the Pentagon. Four days later, Obama broke his promise again. Obama nominated Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson as chief of staff for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on January 27. Goldman Sachs is a major Wall Street bank holding company. After that, everyone pretty much stopped keep-ing count on how many times Obama broke this promise.


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esPolitical arm twisting: Barack Obama promised he wouldn’t allow the use of political office for partisan political gamesmanship. But when Arizona Senate Republican Jon Kyl (left) publicly criticized Obama’s stimulus package, Obama had four cabinet-level Democrats, including Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (right), write letters to Arizona’s governor, threatening to cut off stimulus funds to that state if the governor didn’t pressure Kyl to shut his mouth.

11www.TheNewAmerican.com

Ethics

legislative Five-day online “sunlight” Pledge Promise: “SUNLIGHT BEFORE SIGN-ING: Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them. As president, Barack Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days. In addition to ensuring that the public has the ability to review legisla-tion, the sunlight will help ensure that ear-marks tucked into appropriations bills are exposed. (“Taking Back Our Government” pamphlet on BarackObama.com)

Track Record: Obama hasn’t even tried to keep this promise. The New York Times observed on June 22, “Five months into his administration, Mr. Obama has signed two dozen bills, but he has almost never waited five days. On the recent credit card legislation, which included a controversial measure to allow guns in national parks, he waited just two.”


limiting “state secrets” claims Promise: “It is no coincidence that the disastrous policies of the Bush-Cheney years have been accompanied by unprece-dented secrecy for the American people.... The administration has ignored public dis-closure rules and has invoked a legal tool known as the ‘state secrets’ privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court.... As president, Obama will restore the Ameri-can people’s trust in their government by making government more open and trans-parent.” (“Taking Back Our Government” pamphlet on BarackObama.com)

Track Record: Even though the presi-dent used an executive order to instruct “all members of his administration to operate under principles of openness, transparency and of engaging citizens with their govern-ment,” President Obama has used “state secrets” claims with as much abandon as the Bush administration, and typically in the same kind of cases.

ABC News reported on April 28 that “in the first 100 days, the Obama administra-

tion has invoked the state secrets privilege in three cases: Al Haramain Islamic Foun-dation v. Obama, Mohammed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, and Jewel v. NSA.” Senator Russ Feingold, a fellow Democrat, gave Obama a “D” grade on “rule of law” is-sues at that time, specifically mentioning the state-secrets claims.

Obama’s pledge to abandon “state se-crets” claims was not categorical, however, as he noted on the same campaign website: “The Obama White House would invoke its executive privilege to protect the confi-dentiality of communications concerning national security and similar traditionally sensitive matters, not to withhold informa-tion about private interests’ communica-tion on regulatory policy. There are com-munications that should be kept private because disclosure could endanger the public.” In each of the above cases, howev-er, the suppression of evidence was related to the torture of detainees, or the illegal and unconstitutional warrantless searches that violated the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In other words, the

cases didn’t involve national se-curity, they involved the coverup of crimes against the U.S. Consti-tution. The “state secrets” claims also perfectly matched the same Bush administration policy Obama had nominally criticized during the campaign. Glenn Greenwald of the liberal Salon.com guessed at the true meaning of Obama’s pledge on “state secrets” as early as Febru-ary 10: “Apparently, the operative word in that highlighted paragraph — unbeknownst to most people at the time — was ‘the Bush admin-istration,’ since the Obama admin-istration is now doing exactly that which, during the campaign, it de-fined as ‘The Problem,’ the only dif-ference being that it is now Obama, and not Bush, doing it.” Because Obama’s promises weren’t categor-ical, they can’t be labeled outright lies. But they were clearly deliber-ately deceptive.

Verdict: Deceit

the people’s president? Obama promised that he would not sign into law any non-emergency bill until constituents had five days to give him their input. (He is shown here reading one of the 10 healthcare letters he is said to read each day.) But President Obama has rarely waited five days.


Politics

Transparency in Government

limiting claims of “executive Privilege” Promise: “The American people deserve to know what their government does and why. Ours is an open government, and our abil-ity to understand our government at work — the freedom of information we enjoy — has been copied by other countries around the world. The Freedom of Information Act is a pillar of our open government. Unfor-tunately, in recent years our government has failed to keep the American people in-formed about what it was doing and why, and it has refused to provide Americans with information they are entitled to by law. Turning our tradition of free information upside down, the Bush administration has instructed agencies to presume citizens are not entitled to information unless they are willing to sue for it. Barack Obama would restore the tradition of free information by issuing an Executive Order that information should be released unless an agency reason-ably foresees harm to a protected interest.” (“Taking Back Our Government” pamphlet on BarackObama.com)

Track Record: President Obama has denied Americans access to information even when they have sued to get it. And his spokesmen conspired to mislead the public about the nature of secrets with-held from the public under the “executive privilege” doctrine.

One of the more public examples was the suppression of torture photographs showing instances of abuse and rape of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. One of America’s own generals, recently retired Major General Antonio Taguba, even ad-mitted to the May 27 London Daily Tele-graph that “these pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.” When America’s own generals confirm that the photos document torture and rape, denying it is a pretty tough task.

But the Obama White House did deny it, even as they denied the public access to the photographs. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters at a press briefing the next day that “the ar-ticle is wrong and mischaracterizes the photos that are in question.... None of the photographs in question depict the images described in the article. Again, I think if you do an even moderate Google search, you’re not going to find many of these newspapers and truth within, say, 25 words of each other.” The Pentagon came out with another, almost identical, non-categorical denial the same day. “None of the photos in question depict the images that are described in that article,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told the press on May 28.

Gibbs and Whitman could instead have simply issued a categorical denial that no

photos documented rape and torture. Why did both Gibbs and Whitman use the pecu-liar phrase “the photos in question” to deny the allegation that American handlers had raped detainees? Because they needed a lawyerly way of claiming they hadn’t lied if it were exposed that such photos existed. The very next day (May 29) the Internet magazine Salon reported that U.S. Army Major General Antonio Taguba confirmed that the British newspaper’s account of his quote was accurate: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.” Since Taguba had been the two-star gen-eral in command of the 2004 Abu Ghraib investigation, he was in a position to see all the suppressed photos.

Once the existence of the photos was exposed and confirmed by the same U.S. general who had conducted the Abu Ghraib investigation, all the White House had to say was they were suppressing an entirely different set of photos from the public. Indeed, Taguba had told Salon he wasn’t sure if the photos he had described were among the set that the Obama admin-istration had been seeking to prevent from public disclosure.

However sneaky the deception was, none of it involved an outright lie, because the Obama administration had claimed during the campaign that “the Obama White House would invoke its executive privilege to protect the confidentiality of communications concerning national se-curity and similar traditionally sensitive matters.... There are communications that should be kept private because disclosure could endanger the public.” After the pho-tos were suppressed, Obama argued that publishing photos documenting what our top general had already confirmed would have inflamed terrorists against Americans. It was a “national security” issue, Obama claimed, even though Islamic extremists already believed the worst about detention by Americans. Therefore, Obama’s prom-ises about “executive privilege” were not outright lies, but they were clearly delib-erately deceptive.

Verdict: Deceit

No “signing statements” that Undermine the law Promise: “Obama will sign legislation in the light of day without attaching signing statements that undermine the legislative

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Familiar fickle fate: Under President George W. Bush, the government had secret prisons, secretly committed torture, secretly monitored Americans, and more. Obama promised to change all this — to bring transparency to government. Evidence shows that Bush’s approach of hiding what government does is largely still in effect.

13Call 1-800-727-TRUE to subscribe today!

intent.” (“Taking Back Our Government” pamphlet on BarackObama.com)

Track Record: President Obama issued a signing statement doing just that on June 26, arguing that a bill that established lim-its on how a $106 billion loan guarantee to the International Monetary Fund could be issued “would interfere with my con-stitutional authority to conduct foreign re-

No middle-class tax increase Promise: “I can make a firm pledge: Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase, not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.” (Candidate Obama, at a campaign speech in Dover, New Hampshire, on September 11, 2008)

Track Record: A big part of the reason Obama won the election was his prom-ise not to raise the taxes of middle-class Americans. But President Obama took all

lations by directing the Executive to take certain positions in negotiations or discus-sions with international organizations and foreign governments.” Therefore, Obama wrote, “I will not treat these provisions as limiting my ability to engage in foreign diplomacy or negotiations.” Obama’s ar-rogant attack on the legislature’s sole authority to appropriate funds and make

of two weeks to break this promise, with his signing of the “Children’s Health Insur-ance Program,” which doubled the taxes on tobacco (which is mostly consumed by the poorer half of American society). Obama has also pushed an $840 billion energy tax increase on all Americans from May through July under the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. Obama himself has said that the legislation, infor-mally known as “cap and trade,” would necessarily “skyrocket” Americans’ util-ity bills. He is also reputed to be consider-

laws resulted in a near-unanimous rebuke (429-2 vote) by the U.S. House of Repre-sentatives on July 9. And on July 21, four committee chairmen from Obama’s own Democratic Party wrote to the president saying they were “chagrined” by his sign-ing statement and urging him to withdraw the assertion.


ing a tax increase to pay for his healthcare “reform” package. (BarackObama.com “Fiscal” page)


controlling the National Debt Promise: “Under President Bush, the fed-eral debt has increased from $5.7 trillion to $8.8 trillion, an increase of more than 50 percent.... Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s Record [is] … against Raising the Federal Debt Limit: In 2006, Obama voted against misguided Republican efforts to raise the

statutory debt limit at the same time the Republicans were pushing through mas-sive debt-financed tax cuts for the wealthy.” (BarackO-bama.com “Fiscal” page)

Track Record: The stat-utory debt limit under the Bush administration was raised to $11.3 trillion with passage of the TARP (Trou-bled Asset Relief Program) bailout as the Bush adminis-tration waned. Had Obama updated his campaign web-site after the September pas-sage of the TARP legisla-tion, he could have pointed out that the Bush record of fiscal responsibility had ac-tually gotten worse.

Perhaps Obama didn’t point that out because he had changed sides on the debt issue and voted in favor of (and lobbied for) the TARP legislation increasing


Politics

Fiscal Responsibility

the national debt limit. Once he became president, Obama took all of four weeks to continue the Bush policy to increase the statutory debt level with his “stimu-lus” bill, the so-called American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. That bill, which he signed February 13, increased the statutory debt limit to $12.1 trillion.

Moreover, President Obama’s fiscal 2010 budget proposal calls for increasing the national debt to $17.4 trillion by the time he finishes his first term in 2013. Obama’s budget calls for $500 billion or larger defi-cits every year into the indefinite future.

In sum, Obama plans to add more to the national debt in four years than was added under Bush’s eight years. Obama clearly has no real plan for or interest in stemming the wave of deficit spending the country began under Bush, but his campaign litera-ture wasn’t an explicit lie. He never made any concrete promises about the debt. Obama’s language expressing apparent concern about the public debt was mere throw-away lines for a gullible public.

Verdict: Deceit

No “Pork” Pledge and stimulus Bill Promise: “Cut Pork Barrel Spending: Obama introduced and passed bipartisan legislation that would require more disclo-sure and transparency for special-interest earmarks. Obama and Biden believe that spending that cannot withstand public scrutiny cannot be justified. Obama and Biden will slash earmarks to no greater than year 1994 levels and ensure all spend-ing decisions are open to the public. (Ba-rackObama.com “Fiscal” page)

Track Record: Obama has made no se-

rious effort to control pork barrel spend-ing. “While the number of specific proj-ects declined by 12.5 percent, from 11,610 in fiscal year 2008 to 10,160 in fiscal year 2009,” Citizens Against Government Waste reported in April, “the total tax dol-lars spent to fund them increased by 14 percent, from $17.2 billion to $19.6 bil-lion.” In Obama’s case, he’s transformed the whole nature of pork by making it an executive branch distribution. Obama’s marquis legislation, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (a.k.a. the “stimulus” law), is a prime example. Obama claimed in his June 23 press conference that the “stimulus” had worked because “we know for a fact that states, for example, would have laid off a lot more teachers, a lot more police offi-cers, a lot more firefighters, every single one of those individuals whose jobs were saved.” Of course, teacher and govern-ment employee unions were among the key contributors to his presidential cam-paign. What “worked” was the political payback, and Obama brought pork dollars back to his voters just as local congressmen try to bring pork dollars back to their voters.

The “stimulus” is loaded with lots of more-obvious pork barrel projects, of which these are a few of the flagrant examples:

• CBSNews.com reported $1.1 billion in “stimulus” funding for rural airports on July 13, including ridiculous appropriations such as: “Pur-due University Airport got

$800,000 to help keep animals off the run-way. That’s even though they’ve reported just one incident: a plane ran over a skunk in 1996. In Alaska, $15 million went to build a bigger, better airport for the town of Ouizinkie — population just 165. That’s roughly $90,000 dollars per resident.”

• The Washington Times reported on July 9 that “$16.1 million from the stimu-lus program is going to save the San Fran-cisco Bay area habitat of, among other things, the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse.” The area just happens to abut the congressional district of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

• Citizens Against Government Waste reported a “stimulus” award in Democratic Senator Robert Byrd’s West Virginia: “Paul Turman, West Virginia’s assistant transpor-tation secretary, said the $21 million in stimulus money will connect two unfin-ished stretches of the superhighway at the midpoint of the route. The State Division of Highways said the money will create 60 jobs lasting between 18 and 24 months, which works out to $175,000 in taxpayer

A big part of the reason Obama won the election was his promise not to raise the taxes of middle-class Americans. But President Obama took all of two weeks to break this promise, with his signing of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. He also pushed an $840 billion energy tax increase on all Americans.

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Drowning in debt: Obama and Biden campaigned on a platform critical of raising the federal debt limit. This pledge was actually broken by Obama before he became president: he lobbied for Bush’s TARP legislation that raised the federal debt limit to $11.3 trillion. Now Obama plans large increases in the debt limit.


dollars a year for each job created.” Senator Byrd is known inside the Washington, D.C., beltway as the “Prince of Pork” for his bil-lions of dollars in pork earmarks.

Obama’s pledge to cut pork didn’t come true. But just about every politician pledg-es to cut it and doesn’t. The difference is that the president really can’t stop a deter-mined Congress in passing pork. Congress will always have the power to slip some of its favorite pork into a must-pass bill. But Obama still wins a mark for “deceit” for claiming he could fix it, as well as for expanding it within the executive branch decision-making process.

Verdict: Deceit

cut Government spending Promise: “Obama’s plan will cut taxes overall, reducing revenues to below the levels that prevailed under Ronald Rea-gan (less than 18.2 percent of GDP). The Obama tax plan is a net tax cut — his tax relief for middle class families is larger than the revenue raised by his tax changes for families over $250,000. Coupled with his commitment to cut unnecessary spend-ing, Obama will pay for this tax relief while bringing down the budget deficit.” (BarackObama.com “Taxes” page)

Track Record: While candidate Obama promised overall spending cuts and lower tax revenues, President Obama’s fiscal 2010

budget proposal would increase spending by a third and increase taxes by half before the next presidential election. Even assum-ing his unrealistically optimistic economic growth projections (already proven too optimistic by the history of the past six months), Obama would keep government spending in the 22-23 percent range of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Obama never even proposed, let alone fought for, bringing taxes back to Reagan-era levels.


Healthcare-cost Promises Promise: “Under the [healthcare] plan, if you like your current health insurance, nothing changes, except your costs will go down by as much as $2,500 per year.... Barack Obama will pay for his $50-$65 billion health care reform effort by roll-ing back the Bush tax cuts for Americans earning more than $250,000 per year and retaining the estate tax at its 2009 level.” (BarackObama.com “Health Care” page)

Track Record: Obama’s healthcare package would cost at least $1 trillion in new spending over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Most or all of that figure

would be increased costs, not cost savings. That’s several times the meaningless overall cost figure Obama put into his campaign lit-erature. As it stands in Congress right now, Obamacare would in-crease the deficit by at least $219 billion, assuming that the House version with its massive $581 billion tax increase on taxpay-ers is included in the measure. Obama’s “plan” on his campaign website listed no comprehensive numbers, other than the absurd $50-65 billion costs listed above. Currently, there is no healthcare plan from the Obama administra-tion or congressional Democrats under public discussion that would cut costs to the American consumer. Every plan would in-crease the cost to the American consumers between $800 billion and $1 trillion through either debt

or taxes. That’s an increase in cost to the av-erage consumer of about $2,500, the same figure he promised to cut.

You simply can’t honestly claim to add 47 million people to the government healthcare rolls and then state you’ll cut overall taxpayer costs through cutting “waste.” While it’s possible Obama could have honestly mistaken some figures, there’s no way he could have honestly promised the cost cuts he did and ended up with the increased-cost plans currently under consideration by Congress.

Verdict: Outright Lie* * *

The initial tally of Obama’s honesty in fulfilling his campaign promises to middle America is eight outright lies and four in-stances of deliberate deceit. That’s hardly an encouraging start for President Obama. Americans should remember his pledges and his poor honesty record. As the old saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!” n

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a tax by any other name... Despite repeated promises to never raise taxes on any American who makes less than $250,000 a year, Obama doubled taxes on tobacco only two weeks after taking office. Tobacco is mainly used by low- and middle-income Americans.

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Politics

by William F. Jasper

“All warfare is based on deception.” — The Art of War, by Sun Tzu,

Chinese General, military strategist (sixth century B.C.)

I t was late in the evening of February 12, 2008 when the bearded, pudgy, middle-aged man left a meeting at

an Iranian school in the quiet Kfar Suseh neighborhood of Damascus, Syria, and walked to his car, which was parked on the street. No sooner had he climbed into his Mitsubishi Pajero than the vehicle erupted in a mighty blast, killing him instantly. A few hours later, consumers of the morning news learned the identity of the car-bomb victim. It was none other than the elu-sive Hezbollah terror master, Imad Fayez Mugniyeh, one of the most hunted — and most dangerous — men on the planet.

Unlike his better-known terrorist col-leagues, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mugniyeh shunned public-ity. He didn’t give interviews, pose for

photos, or issue audio or video recordings to Al Jazeerah media outlets. He rarely broke cover, was always on the move, and reportedly never slept in the same bed two nights in a row. Only a few photographs of him are known to exist despite his hav-ing cut an unparalleled swath of terror over the previous 25 years. Yet he was at the apex of the global terrorist pyramid, sitting with bin Laden on the super-secret Committee of Three.

Imad Mugniyeh burst onto the interna-tional terrorist scene in 1983 with a series of spectacular, deadly bombings aimed at driving U.S. forces out of Lebanon. At the time he was a mere 20 years old, but was already a veteran of many terrorist actions. The 1983 Beirut suicide bombings includ-ed the April 18 U.S. Embassy (63 killed); the October 23 U.S. Marine barracks (241 killed); and the October 23 French para-trooper barracks (58 killed). A litany of bombings, hijackings, kidnappings, and assassinations followed, with an ever in-creasing body count. He has been credited with masterminding and/or participating in

terrorist acts ranging from the car bomb-ings of the Israeli embassy and the Jewish cultural center in Argentina in the early 1990s, to the World Trade Center bomb-ing of 1993; the Khobar Towers suicide bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996; the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanza-nia in 1998; the 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen; and the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The 9/11 Commission Report’s references (pages 240-241) to “a senior Hezbollah operative” shepherding the future 9/11 hijackers in and out of Iran refer to Mugniyeh, say inside sources.

Osama bin Laden spoke admiringly of Mugniyeh’s lethal handiwork and in 1993 met with Mugniyeh in Khartoum, Sudan, to form a working alliance. That historic meeting was brokered by Ali Mohamed, bin Laden’s master spy/double agent in-side the FBI, whose story is told in rivet-ing detail in Peter Lance’s newly released Triple Cross (reviewed in The New Amer-icAN, August 17, 2009).

The question that dominated the news headlines and the blogosphere in the im-


terrorism

No State Sponsors, No Terror

For 30 years Iran has been the leading state sponsor of global terror — with Syria, Cuba, and North Korea as helpmates. But behind them have been the terror masters of the Soviet KGB, and its renamed successor, the Russian FSB.

mediate aftermath of Mugni-yeh’s assassination was: who did it? No one claimed credit for the deed. The most likely suspect, and the one most often cited, was the Israeli Mossad. Some pointed to the CIA (and/or the FBI, which had placed a $5 million boun-ty on Mugniyeh). Some sug-gested a joint Mossad/CIA operation. However, some in the Islamic world pointed to intelligence agencies of Arab nations that had their own reasons for wanting to “take out” Mugniyeh. Considerable suspicion in the Arab-world press focused also on Syria as the perpetrator, while some speculated that Iran might even be responsible. It was reported in some press and in-telligence blog accounts that on the night of his execution by car bomb, Mugniyeh had just concluded a meeting with Hamas leaders, Syrian intel-ligence officials, and Iran’s new ambas-sador to Damascus, on the occasion of the 29th anniversary of the Iranian revolution (February 12, 1979). And the meeting at the school was but a short distance from a Syrian intelligence center in Syria’s tightly controlled police-state.

As the most notorious operational leader of Hezbollah, with whom Israel has battled for decades, Mugniyeh was, understand-ably, a prime target for the Mossad. He has also been a major thorn in the sides of Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, all of which had good rea-sons for wanting him dead. But Syria and Iran? They were his longtime sponsors. Precisely. And as some terrorism experts have argued (Kenneth Timmerman, for one), Tehran and Damascus have been anx-ious that Mugniyeh’s ties to 9/11 and other terror acts may be used by Washington to justify military attacks on Iran and Syria.

whose man was He?So, did Mugniyeh’s death represent a vic-tory by Israel, the United States, or an Arab state over a longtime, implacable foe? Or was it a clean-up operation by Syria or Iran? This writer does not claim to know,

though it would seem the preponderance of evidence points toward Tel Aviv. But a far more important question than who killed Imad Mugniyeh is: who was he working for? Terrorism is a form of warfare, the ultimate in asymmetric, unconventional warfare. And to it, Sun Tzu’s maxim that “all warfare is based on deception” applies in spades. Terrorists do not wear uniforms, carry their banners openly, fight on the open battlefield, or directly confront the military of their adversaries; their entire modus operandi is one of secrecy, stealth, and deception, especially in this age of satellite surveillance, computer data min-ing, and pervasive electronic eavesdrop-ping. They are particularly conscious of protecting their subterranean networks and concealing all trails that might lead back to their state sponsors. And their state sponsors, mindful of the global reach of assassin teams and GPS-guided precision missiles, are even more highly motivated to maintain “plausible deniability” by structuring their ties to terrorists through several layers of surrogates.

Thus we have witnessed for years an ongoing charade in which Iran and Syria have claimed to have no ties to Mugniyeh

and other wanted terrorists. And Hezbollah, mimicking its masters, has voiced the same absurd denials. “For its part, Hezbollah has consistently denied the existence of any relationship with Mugniyeh, direct or indirect,” notes Judith Palmer Harik in her 2005 book Hezbollah: The Changing Face of Terrorism. “As a mat-ter of record,” she continues, “from the time of the party’s inception, all Hezbollah offi-cials have emphatically denied ever knowing a person by the name of Imad Mugniyeh.” But as Harik points out, it is “im-possible for any member of Hezbollah’s present leadership

to deny knowing Mugniyeh, since all of them are known to have been intimately in-volved with the day-to-day functions of the Baalbek training camps,” where Mugniyeh played a major role in preparing terrorist cadres for their deadly trade.

However, at Mugniyeh’s funeral, all those who had been denying connec-tions to him for years — Hezbollah, Iran, Syria — let their masks fall (partially) to claim him as their own and eulogize him as a martyr. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad eulogized him as “an out-standing leader from Hizballah.” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised him as “an example for the young generation to follow.” Lebanese Hezbol-lah’s General Secretary, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, used Mugniyeh’s funeral to threaten a retaliatory all-out war against Israel. “With this murder, its timing, loca-tion and method — Zionists, if you want this kind of open war, let the whole world listen: Let this war be open!”

The deception regarding Mugniyeh is duplicated again with regard to Hezbol-lah’s ties to terror, as well as its crucial ties to Damascus and Tehran. According to its leaders, as well as its many advocates

sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s general secretary, shown here broadcast on a giant screen in Beirut, with an image of slain Hezbollah terrorist Imad Mugniyeh over his shoulder.

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terrorism

in the press, academe, and the United Na-tions, Hezbollah (in Arabic, the Party of God — sometimes spelled Hizbullah or Hizb’Allah) is not a terrorist group at all, but instead a social welfare, charitable or-ganization, providing food, schooling, and medical care to the poor and downtrodden. Swedish terrorist expert Magnus Ranstorp notes it is perfectly understandable that the terrorists and their state sponsors would lie about their actions, intentions, and con-nections. “Less understandable,” he says, “are the many academics who allowed themselves to be misled about Hezbol-lah’s clandestine wing and its use by Iran and, at times, Syria…. They preferred to believe that Hezbollah could not possibly harbor a secret structure involved in terror-ism, when its above-the-board operations — social, political and military — were so effective and (according to some) so noble and legitimate. And so Hezbollah was al-lowed to have its cake and eat it too.”

Deniable assetsMuch the same can be said for PLO-Fatah and Hamas, as well; their apologists in the media, academia, and influential policy circles claim they are no longer terrorists (some insist they never were). At any rate, they have transformed (or are in the pro-cess of transforming) into legitimate po-litical groups. Any terrorist acts attributed to them, say the apologists, are actually the work of “rogue elements,” shadowy “splinter groups,” or mysterious groups of unknown origin and makeup.

This phenomenon is nothing new; Yassir Arafat, the Crown Prince of modern terror-ism, proved himself the master of deception in this regard with his creation of the ulti-mate ruse in “plausible deniability”: Black September. It is now an established fact (though still not sufficiently well known) that the Black September terrorist group, which carried out the Munich Massacre at the 1972 Olympics and other terrorist acts, was created and controlled by Arafat as a “deniable asset” to perform dirty deeds for which he did not want to be held account-able. Arafat publicly disavowed any con-

nection to Black September and theatrically condemned their actions, while privately con-gratulating his terrorist minions for mayhem well done. Black September was purely Arafat’s operation, just as he, in turn, was the deniable asset of com-munist Romania’s intelligence service, the DIE, which, in turn, was the deniable cat’s paw of the Soviet KGB.

This process of deception and deniability was perfected by the So-viet Union as it launched successive waves of terror in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. The Kremlin’s hands were usually well hid-den, its KGB and GRU handlers working through their subsidiary Czech, East Ger-man, Bulgarian, or Romanian intelligence services, which, in turn, operated through Libya, Yemen, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and North Korea, whose agents, in turn, inter-faced directly with the terrorists: the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof, the PLO, PFLP, IRA, FMLN, etc. Yet, so massive and extensive was the global terror war that the accumulated evidence of Moscow’s direc-tion of the entire effort became overwhelm-ing, despite all attempts to conceal it.

Studies in the 1970s and ’80s — such as The Terror Network by Claire Sterling, Terrorism: The Soviet Connection by Ray

S. Cline and Yonah Alexander, KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Agents by John Bar-ron, and Red Horizons by Ion Mihai Pace-pa — made it impossible for reasonable people to continue ignoring the elephant under the doily. What became strikingly clear was that there wasn’t a single signifi-cant terrorist group that could legitimately claim to be independent and self sufficient; all relied on the intricate Soviet-directed network for arms, explosives, communica-tions, training, intelligence, funding, sanc-tuary, passports, identification papers, and much more.

Without state sponsorship terrorism would wither and die. Thus, any genuine effort aimed at eradicating terrorism must confront the ultimate state sponsors. Oth-erwise one will be reduced to ineffectually striking at branches instead of the root,

Mugniyeh shunned publicity. Only a few pictures of him are known to exist despite his having cut an unparalleled swath of terror over the previous 25 years. Yet he was at the apex of the global terrorist pyramid, sitting with bin Laden on the super-secret Committee of Three.

Nuclear comrades: Russian Atomic Agency Chief Sergei Kiriyenk (left) and Iranian Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh at a February 25, 2009 press conference for the launch of Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant. A

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or to use another analogy, wasting one’s energy and resources putting out endless fires, rather than arresting the arsonists.

evil twins: syria and iranWhen it comes to state sponsors of terrorism Syria and Iran are the evil twins: commu-nists and Khomeinists. Although Damas-cus has been in the terror business longer, it has been surpassed by Tehran, with its new brand of Islamo-Leninism, a blend of Marx and Mohammed. Syria is still run by the communist Baath Party, which took over in a coup d’état in 1966. In 1970, Syrian Air Force officer Hafez al-Assad, who had been trained in the Soviet Union, took over in an intra-party coup. He was to rule with the proverbial iron fist for the next 30 years, until his death in 2000. At which point, in a fashion similar to the Kim Il Sung communist mon-archy in North Korea, Hafez passed on the throne to his son, Bashar al-Assad. Hafez al-As-sad quickly established him-self as Moscow’s most loyal ally in the Middle East. So much so that Soviet boss Le-onid Brezhnev, in his keynote address to the 25th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1976, praised Syria’s Baathist regime and declared that the two countries “act in concert in many inter-national problems, above all in the Middle East.”

In the 1970s, the Soviet Union began shipping Assad huge amounts of war materiel

— tanks, rockets, fighter jets, small arms, explo-sives, radar, communi-cations equipment — in addition to thousands of military and intelligence personnel, from Cuba, Bulgaria, Czechoslova-kia, North Korea, and East Germany, as well as the Soviet Union. By mid-1980, more than 500 KGB advisers were train-ing Syrian intelligence

officers at a base near Damascus.Syria quickly became a key base for

avowed Marxist-Leninist terrorist groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organiza-tion (PLO), the Popular Front for the Lib-eration of Palestine (PFLP), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Gen-eral Command (PFLP-GC), the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), the Popular Front for the Libera-tion of Oman (PFLO), and the Democratic

Front for the Liberation of Somalia (DFLS). It later also became a base for Islamo-Le-ninist groups (both Shia and Sunni) such as Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Hamas (Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal has lived in Damascus since 1999, along with other top Hamas leaders), and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, while an even broader assortment of terrorists has been trained (and is being trained currently) at Syria’s terror camps in Lebanon.

In its 2006 Lebanon incursion, Israel’s vaunted armor columns took surprising casualties from Hezbollah forces equipped with sophisticated armor-piercing, laser-guided, anti-tank missiles from Russia — by way of Syria. In one overrun Hezbollah position, Israeli forces captured a cache of Russia’s top-of-the-line Komet missiles. The label on each missile read: “Cus-tomer: Ministry of Defence of Syria. Sup-plier: KBP, Tula, Russia.” This and other evidence belied Syria’s continued denials that it was involved in the Lebanon terror.

Although Hafez al-Assad’s Baathist regime in Syria had a nine-year head start in the Soviet-sponsored terror business, Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic of Iran would soon eclipse him. The overthrow of Shah Pahlavi by Soviet-backed street radicals and the Carter administration in 1979 was a seismic shift of epic magni-tude. Iran was flipped, virtu-ally overnight, from being the most pro-Western, most mod-erate Islamic power in the re-gion, and a critical roadblock to Soviet regional hegemony, to a force for global revolution and terror. Khomeini’s militant fusion of Marx and Moham-med would resonate with mil-lions of Muslims who could not accept the secular social-ist tenets of the region’s other Soviet client-states: Syria, Libya, and Iraq. Khomeiniism was the perfect made-to-order fit for the Andropov Paradigm: the plan to craft and promote a radicalized, Leninist form of Islam to infect millions of Muslims worldwide with fa-natical anti-American hatred.

As Harik points out, it is “impossible for any member of Hezbollah’s present leadership to deny knowing Mugniyeh, since all of them are known to have been intimately involved with the day-to-day functions of the Baalbek training camps,” where Mugniyeh played a major role in preparing terrorist cadres for their deadly trade.

iran’s terror chief, Dr. Mahdi Chamran (left) speaks with President Ahmadinejad (right) during a session of parliament in August 2005. Chamran oversees the global terror operations of Hezbollah International.

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Yuri Andropov (head of the KGB,1967-1982, and head of the Soviet Union, 1982-1984) assured Romania’s spymaster, Gen-eral Ion Mihai Pacepa, that “the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of Amer-ica-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought…. Their illiter-ate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.”

Ayatollah Khomeini fulfilled Androp-ov’s wildest dreams. Upon taking over in Iran, the Ayatollah affixed the label of “the Great Satan” to the United States. The So-viet Union was viciously persecuting the Muslims of neighboring Azerbaijan, Turk-menistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyr-gyzstan, and Tajikistan (and would soon invade Afghanistan), but Khomeini insisted that Muslims see the United States, not the Soviet Union, as Satanic. When Russia later invaded Chechnya and slaughtered Mus-lims by the tens of thousands, Khomeini’s successors in Tehran gave tacit approval, thereby blunting expressions of outrage by other Islamic countries.

Training terrorists became a primary order of business for Khomeini, and terror camps at Manzarieh Park in Tehran, Marv-dasht camp near Persepolis, Bushehr air base, and Dowshan Tappeh air base were soon set up with communist instructors from North Korea, Vietnam, Bulgaria, and East Germany. These were joined by over 300 Farsi-speaking KGB officers from the Soviet Union. The modern wave of suicide bombing was about to begin, thanks to these foreign trainers, who fortified their expertise in traditional brainwashing tech-niques with new advances in mind-control drugs. The man who developed the Ayatol-lah’s pharmaceutical “martyr” program is Dr. Aziz al-Abub (real name, Ibrahim al-Nahdhir), a psychiatrist who was trained at the Soviet Union’s KGB-run People’s Friendship University and schooled by the notorious terrorist Abu Nidal. Aziz al-Abub became a founder of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Iranian-directed Hezbollah; he remains a key player in their terror program.

In June 1996, Iran marked a new mile-stone in the global terror war with the launch of Hezbollah International (HI), to be a central command uniting both Shia and Sunni Islamists. A secret summit was attended by leaders of al-Qaeda, Hezbol-

lah, Hamas, Islamic Change Movement, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Pal-estine-General Command. The summit concluded with creation of a Shia-Sunni Hezbollah International, headed by a Committee of Three: Imad Mugniyeh (Hezbollah, Shia), Osama bin Laden (al-Qaeda, Sunni), and Ahmad Salah (Egyp-tian Islamic Jihad, Sunni).

Sitting above HI’s Committee of Three is Dr. Mahdi Chamran, chief of Iranian external intelligence, head of international terrorism, and mayor of Tehran. Mahdi and his brother Mostafa (killed in 1981) were communist radicals at California universi-ties in the 1960s, where they created “Red Shiism,” a fusion of Marx and Moham-med. Among Khomeini’s earliest acolytes, the Chamrans got in on the ground floor of the Iranian revolution. Mahdi Chamran, who holds a Ph.D. in nuclear physics, also has been in charge of Iran’s nuclear devel-opment program from the start, where he works closely with the Russian, Chinese, and North Korean scientists and techni-cians who are building Iran’s nuclear fa-cilities and missile program. Of course, his Hezbollah International work requires him to work closely with the intelligence services of those three countries as well. To keep things rolling on that score, one of Chamran’s most important assets is Imad Hadj Hassan Salame, who heads the HI special operations unit (Muntamat

al-Jihad al-Islami, or MJI) in Moscow. Salame’s Moscow MJI unit provides the crucial interface with Russia’s FSB and GRU for arranging the transfer of arms and other critical materials from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Bulgaria, Ro-mania, and the Balkans.

Clearly, Russia is the ultimate state sponsor of terrorism; Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Kosovo, Lebanon, and other terrorist facilitators are merely proxies. Putin and the current rulers of the Krem-lin are continuing the “Islamic” terror op-tion outlined by Andropov more than three decades ago, as KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn has repeatedly warned. “U.S. policy makers have recklessly accepted the premise that Russia and China are no longer their enemies, but are rather po-tential allies and partners fully deserving U.S. support,” Golitsyn wrote in his 1990 book The Perestroika Deception. “Only countries like Iran, Iraq and North Korea — which (ironically, in this context) work secretly with Russia and China — are still considered potential adversaries.”

All of which should call to mind Sun Tzu’s sober comment in The Art of War: “It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.” n

iraqi suicide bomber Sajida Mubarek Atrous al-Rishawi was sent as a human bomb to attack a hotel in Amman, Jordan, in November 2005, but her belt failed to detonate.

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Founded 1880

ScottFarm

The John W. Scott FarmJOHN W. SCOTT • JACk SCOTT

To what avail the plow or sail or land or life if freedom fail?

OFFICe • 701-869-2446FACSImIle • 701-869-2829emAIl • [email protected]

P.O. BOx 186GIlBy, NORTH DAkOTA 58235

FeedingAmerica

by Becky Akers

Not long ago, Americans feared and ridiculed the police states cursing too many parts of the world. We

worried that they might one day conquer us despite their poverty and general mis-ery even as we mocked their totalitarian tactics — especially their “Papers, please” mentality. Indeed, being forced to prove one’s identity to a bureaucrat on demand, having to carry and produce documents with personal information for his approval — or condemnation — seemed especially horrifying. One of our classic films, Casa-blanca, revolved around the deadly hassles of obtaining or forging such papers under the Nazis; episodes of Mission Impossible in the 1960s often featured the same de-tail as American agents outwitted sinister Slavic tyrants.

What tragic irony, then, that the U.S. government increasingly compels us to identify ourselves. And it’s an even greater tragedy that this command no longer ter-rifies Americans, let alone goads them to protest.

Until now. While the president and his cronies push the country toward full-fledged fascism, state legislatures have

rebelled against a federal edict that estab-lishes a key component of such tyrannies: the national ID card.

Congress passed the REAL ID Act in 2005 as a rider on a bill handing more of our money to the military. There was no debate about either the concept of a na-tional ID or the details of implementing it — including the astronomical costs of forcing states to convert the driver’s li-censes they issue into national ID cards.

That expense may explain the fiery opposition REAL ID sparked — opposi-tion unprecedented in our lifetime. Some states forbade their bureaucracies to com-ply with REAL ID while others officially denounced the legislation.

Feds Firing BackBut the feds haven’t surrendered. Instead, they’ve drafted virtually identical legisla-tion under an alias — “Providing for Ad-ditional Security in States’ Identification Act of 2009” (PASS ID) — with one dif-ference: states keep more of the taxes they extort from us (or, as Government Tech-nology puts it, PASS ID “reduc[es] costs by providing greater flexibility for states to meet federal requirements by eliminat-ing fees associated with the use of existing

databases”). Nevertheless, the last time a federal outrage generated this much fury, Northerners and Southerners went to war.

And an outrage it is. By whatever name, this legislation puts your driver’s license on speed, ramping it up into a national ID. It dramatically increases the personal information your license contains, the number of bureaucrats who can access that data, and the circumstances when the government will not only scrutinize your ID but then decide whether you may pro-ceed with your business — or not.

Though REAL ID wasn’t and PASS ID isn’t explicit about embedding a tracking chip or including biometric data such as fingerprints or retinal scans in licenses, it’s likely both would occur sooner rather than later. And you’ll be flashing your card so much you’ll probably wear it around your neck rather than dig it out of your wallet: the feds will inspect it each time you so much as enter a location under their jurisdiction, including courthouses and airports. You’ll have to show it to open a bank account as well. That custom will doubtless spread to all financial transac-tions, even the most picayune, as Ameri-cans become inured to the constant order, “Papers, please.”


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though real iD implementation stalled, its twin, Pass iD, seems to be gaining traction because the federal government is poised to fund the mandate.

“ Your Papers, Please!”

No wonder REAL ID provoked rebellion. But little of it was grass-roots: except for members of or-ganizations like the John Birch Society or Campaign for Liberty, most folks still know very little about REAL ID or PASS ID and care even less; a few actually ap-plaud a national ID because the government claims it fights ter-rorism. Rather, organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Fron-tier Foundation (which “defend[s] your rights in the digital world”) led the charge. Joining them were the governors of various states in a nigh revolutionary stand-off with the feds. That’s even more remark-able when we consider Washing-ton, D.C.’s countless other anti-constitutional incursions over the last hundred years, most of which eviscerated states’ sovereignty just as much as if not more than REAL ID does. Yet it was REAL ID — not affirmative action and its contempt for freedom of association, nor environmental regulations that gut property rights, nor the massacres at Waco and Ruby Ridge — that finally galvanized states to defy the federal Frankenstein.

Why? Most of the governors opposed to REAL ID cited two reasons. They pro-fessed concern about our vanishing lib-erty — a concern strangely missing from their acceptance of other unconstitutional mandates, as well as their own tyranni-cal decrees. They also complained about its cost, which conservative estimates put somewhere around $23 billion. Yet D.C.’s dictators impose plenty of other unfunded mandates on states, and while governors complain, they don’t rebel.

Still, money likely motivated their mu-tiny. For one thing, the National Gover-nors Association likes PASS ID because it believes the feds have learned their lesson and will put the dollars where their bill is this time. For another, states resented spending billions on REAL ID’s outlay, but that’s only a tiny part of the story. Li-censing drivers is a gold mine for local governments, one so lucrative that they’re highly suspicious of federal interest in the process.

Indeed, the loot from licensing us, as

well as the plunder from concomitant fees and fines, is so vast that no one knows the actual amount. That’s partly because governments conceal their profits lest big-ger, badder governments steal from them what they stole from us: municipalities often hide how much they extract in traf-fic tickets for fear their state will demand a bigger cut. So even in our computerized age with its sophisticated methods of ac-counting, no one knows how much tickets alone filch from us. The National Motor-ists Association estimates the amount at somewhere between $3.75 and $7.5 bil-lion annually — and that excludes parking tickets. Now add fees for car registration, driver’s licenses, license plates, title certif-icates, and inspections, as well as the taxes that encumber all things automotive (sales of cars, insurance, gasoline, and parking), to say nothing of parking meters and tolls. (Newsday reported that New York City alone collected 126 million tolls solely for crossing to and from the island of Manhat-tan in 2006; these ranged from a couple dollars for motorcycles to $36 or more for a truck with five axles.)

Picking our pockets on behalf of the State is one of licensing’s two basic pur-poses, regardless of its type: professional (doctor’s, realtor’s, broadcasting), fishing and hunting, driver’s. Linda Lewis-Pickett,

president and CEO of the American Asso-ciation of Motor Vehicle Administrators in 2006, frankly admitted that “each state agency has looked at DMVs as revenue generators — ‘Come in and pay taxes and give us money.’” The driver’s licenses and plates those DMVs dispense also enable officials to track us to a billing address, no matter how flawed the issuing cop’s judg-ment, regardless of how we disagree with his assessment of our speed or the length of time we paused at a stop sign.

Paternal regulationsLicensing’s other purpose is the control it grants rulers. There’s a reason licenses are also known as “permits”: what the govern-ment permits one day it may prohibit the next. Wielding the power to deprive a man of his livelihood or his ability to travel keeps him obedient and cringing.

If that doesn’t inspire us to question government’s licensing of drivers, perhaps the system’s inherent insult will. Licens-ing implies that we are silly children eager to drive without bothering to learn how; only the fatherly State saves us from auto-motive annihilation.

That paternal motif increasingly charac-terizes states’ interactions with drivers as they withhold this “privilege” to coerce our behavior, the way parents do teens. Many

Don’t leave home without it: The proposed national ID in the PASS ID legislation would function much the same as the NEXUS ID, with embedded RFID technology that can be read by machines from a distance, used at U.S. borders for prescreened travelers. Using this prototype would allow the government to track us wherever we go.

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revoke licenses for a long list of infrac-tions, not just those that pertain to driving. Minnesota will suspend a license for “tru-ancy,” “underage consumption of alcohol,” or merely the “attempt to unlawfully pur-chase alcohol or tobacco,” “failure to pay child support,” and “out-of-state convic-tion.” Ohio repeals its permission to drive for “dropping out of high school, drug-re-lated offenses, unsatisfied civil judgments, delinquent, unruly, or habitual drug user (juveniles), failure to appear in court on a bond, liquor law violations, medical condi-tion that would impair your driving ability [and who decides that?], tagged as a ‘prob-lem driver’ in the National Driver Registry, insurance noncompliance, unresolved out-of-state ticket, out-of-state alcohol- or drug-related offenses.”

DMVs not only exploit this authority, they brag about it. “We walk a very fine line with incredible power over people,” David Lewis, deputy registrar of the Mas-sachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles, told author Simson Garfinkle in 1993 for an ar-ticle published in Wired Magazine. Peter Nunnenkamp, manager of driver programs at Oregon’s Driver and Motor Vehicle Services agreed. “[Suspending a license is] the most effective thing that you can do without throwing them in jail.... And it’s fairly cost effective.” So much so that DMVs seldom struggle with delinquent debtors. “Last year,” Garfinkle wrote, “the Massachusetts Registry collected more than US$660 million in fees and fines; less than $600,000 came back as bounced checks — a whopping 0.1 percent. ‘How can you afford to stiff us?’ Lewis asks rhe-torically. ‘Whatever it is you have, we’ll take it. We’ll pull your driver’s license. We’ll take your title.’” A capo in the mob sounds less menacing.

If government were honest enough to say, “Look, we want lots and lots of your money, and we also want to subju-gate you,” most people would (we hope) deny it the power to license. So as usual, the State cloaks its motives in false so-licitude. Licensing protects us, it claims

— from selfish sportsmen who would hunt and fish our fields and streams to exhaustion, from broad-casters who would as-sault our ears with foul language, from reckless drivers. But is any of that true? And if so, if fisher-men and radio announcers and drivers are as great a menace as rulers allege, are there more effective ways to protect us from their dangers than by licensing them?

In the case of driver’s licenses, the al-legations about safety postdate licensing by several decades. Early drivers simply bought licenses without meeting any requirements whatsoever. In fact, folks often ordered them through the mail: no one tested eyesight, competence, or anything else. Only payment received mattered to the issuing government. Carl Watner at voluntaryist.com reports that by 1909, “twelve states and the District of Columbia required all automobile drivers to obtain” licenses. These generally listed

the operator’s “name, address, age, and the type of automobile he claimed to be competent to drive.”

That contented many states for years; decades sometimes passed before they also forced drivers to satisfy a bureaucrat as to their vision and skills. Massachusetts and Missouri were both selling licenses by 1903, but only in 1920 did “Massachusetts . . . [pass] its first requirement for an ex-amination of general operators,” and “Mis-souri had no driver examination law until 1952.” This at a time when both cars and roads lacked many of the protective fea-tures we now take for granted.

This legislation dramatically increases the personal information your license contains, the number of bureaucrats who can access that data, and the circumstances when the government will not only scrutinize your ID but then decide whether you may proceed with your business — or not.

county treasurer Paula schneider (standing) and Clerk Geneva Spoon know almost everyone in Ellsworth, Kansas (population 2,965), but the Feds will force them to withhold driver’s licenses if friends and neighbors can’t document identity. A

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DMVs have come a long way since then. Modern ones administer driving and eye-sight exams. They harp on seat belts and speed limits. They hang posters about de-fensive driving in their offices, then compel us to camp out there for hours while slow, surly clerks waste our time and money. That fools most Americans into equating licensed drivers with safe drivers.

Yet little research proves that licensing ensures anything other than increased rev-enues for government. Some studies pur-port to establish a link between licensing and safety, but two problems doom these. First, most of them assume rather than prove that governmental licensing equals safety (licensing by a private entity, per-haps an insurance company that requires

proof of superior skill and prudence be-fore staking its money on an applicant, would be another and very different mat-ter). Then they compare two incomparable groups: licensed drivers, about whom we know a great deal (how many exist over-all, their ages, their driving records, their places of residence, etc.), and unlicensed drivers, about whom there’s almost no information, collectively or individually. As the American Automobile Association warns, “[The] methodology [of research-ers who study licensing and safety] has limitations.... [I]t is hard to arrive at reli-able findings for unlicensed drivers simply because so little is known about them.”

And one set of such drivers actually es-tablishes the futility of Leviathan’s licens-

ing. The American Acad-emy of Pediatrics reported last year: “No relationship was found between li-cense status and reported crashes” among teen driv-ers — despite the fact that the unlicensed ones tended to drink and drive, speed, etc. It concluded that about six percent of them “drive

unlicensed” — but “on av-erage, they do not seem to have increased crash risk

compared with licensed teens. However, they display increased unsafe driving be-haviors, particularly lower rates of seat belt

use, which puts them at higher risk for in-jury and death when a crash occurs.”

Meanwhile, many of the drivers Levia-than licenses are notoriously dangerous nonetheless. Not only are teens a hazard, as their insurance rates testify, so are el-derly drivers. A study from 1998 noted that “some statistics show they are more likely to be involved in fatal accidents than all other age groups but those under 25.” Licensing does not quicken slow reflexes, and the visual tests most DMVs administer are so fatuous even patients suffering from cataracts and glaucoma can pass them. Then, too, we’ve all read about or known someone injured or killed by a drunk but licensed driver with multiple offenses to his credit. The bureaucrats who promise to protect us so long as we cede our liberty to them have failed abysmally.

There’s an army of them, too. The agen-cies connected to automotive transporta-tion in each state — from those that build and repair the roads to those that issue driver’s licenses and plates to those that cruise the highways trapping unwary driv-ers and robbing them of even more money — are myriad and labyrinthine. They hire phalanxes of union members who protest each and every cut a state makes to their budget with the excuse that the “custom-ers” they “serve” deserve better: when California recently tried to cut expenses by eliminating overtime — not jobs, mind you, just overtime — at DMVs, one em-ployee moaned to ABC News, “We had to turn a lot of people away because we can’t serve them because we have to be out at 5:00 p.m. We cannot get no overtime [sic], so now we have customers yelling at us thinking it’s our fault.”

“Customers” should wise up. Rather than begging our rulers for longer hours and shorter lines so that we can more eas-ily pay their extortion, we should demand that they quit charging us for a “privilege” we already own as a right.

rights and reasoningDespite DMVs’ propaganda to the con-trary, traveling by any means — walking; riding a horse, bus, train, or plane; driving a car — is one of the inalienable rights we possess by virtue of our humanity. Unless

Meanwhile, many of the drivers Leviathan licenses are notoriously dangerous nonetheless. Not only are teens a hazard, as their insurance rates testify, so are elderly drivers. A study from 1998 noted that “some statistics show they are more likely to be involved in fatal accidents than all other age groups but those under 25.”

licensing drivers gives government an excuse to compile so much information on us that the Department of Homeland Security uses the states’ DMVs when it wants to find someone.

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we trespass, we assault no one’s life, lib-erty, or property by simply moving from one location to another. The State has no moral authority to interfere.

Why, then, did our grandparents allow government to license cars in the first place? Didn’t this strike them as a bizarre and intrusive innovation? After all, no one licensed horses and buggies.

Unfortunately, inventors developed the internal combustion engine just as pro-gressive politics with its veneration of Leviathan was hijacking the nation. Pro-gressives convinced Americans who had formerly distrusted government that it was in fact their best friend, a benign giant protecting them in the frightening, rapidly changing world of electricity, telephones, airplanes, and automobiles.

Add to that the fear most people harbor for new technology, especially technolo-gy they can’t afford. Cars were playthings for the wealthy when they first appeared on the market — but noisy, smelly nui-sances to everyone else. The folks whose horses shied as a newfangled automobile zipped past deeply resented this emerging industry.

And once Mr. Millionaire bought his car, where did he drive it? The early 20th century boasted very few paved roads.

These considerations spurred automo-tive enthusiasts to welcome government’s interest in their hobby. If the State ap-proved of driving enough to license it, ev-eryone must accept it, even those too poor to afford cars. And what politicians regu-late, they usually fund, too. The magnates buying horseless carriages wanted all tax-payers, not just themselves, to subsidize the infrastructure their new toys required.

Since then, government has consolidat-ed its conquest of our automotive lives — a conquest so complete most people take it for granted despite the State’s incompe-tence and even criminal negligence. It mo-nopolizes the design and construction of roadways; meanwhile, we mourn roughly 42,000 traffic fatalities year after year. De-liberate carelessness like drunk driving ac-counts for some of these deaths, but others result when drivers follow the rules of the road as imposed by the State.

Bureaucrats heavily regulate automotive design and manufacture, too. Their latest mania is more miles to the gallon. But many experts blame the requisite flimsiness for

more fatalities when crashes occur: cars built from plastic rather than steel reduce consumption of fuel but put occupants at risk. And government’s decades of ineptly micromanaging Detroit’s Big Three led di-rectly to their failure and nationalization.

In short, an accident of history put gov-ernment behind the wheel of all things automotive. But there’s no reason we should acquiesce in this. Certainly we should work to ensure that PASS ID suf-fers REAL ID’s same fate. But let’s go the extra mile and oppose the State’s licensing of drivers at all.

Whether in their current incarnation or REAL ID’s űber-version, driver’s licens-es swindle huge amounts of our money while giving the State virtually unlimited authority and an excuse for spying on us. They also destroy the private market that would otherwise exist for authenti-cating one’s name and credentials — a market with virtually none of the fraud and identity theft that characterize the government’s monopoly of this industry. It would be a differentiated market, too, offering degrees of authentication for ev-erything from cashing a check to entering a restricted area, rather than the one-size-fits-all approach of driver’s licenses that divulges our names, addresses, birth-dates, height, and weight to every bank teller and supermarket clerk.

Indeed, frightening amounts of our per-sonal data clog DMVs’ computers. Profes-sor Margaret Stock of the United States Military Academy at West Point inadver-tently makes that point when arguing that

governments should issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. She writes that “driver li-cense and state identification databases play” a huge “role” “in national security and law enforcement.”

“The collective DMV databases are the largest law enforcement databases in the country,” she continues, “with records on more individual adults than any other law enforcement databases. The collective DMV databases are the only comprehen-sive internal security database.

“The Department of Homeland Secu-rity (DHS) does not yet have a compre-hensive database on all adult residents of the United States.... When DHS wants to find someone, the primary government da-tabase it relies upon is the driver license database.

“When a person … applies for a driver license, that person … provides the DMV with a variety of valuable personal infor-mation — including a key identifier, the digital photo. DMV databases thus contain biometric information, and a wealth of other valuable information that is updated on a regular basis … by the individual who has the license.” She insists that other da-tabases can’t compete with the depth and breadth of the DMVs’ — not the “state birth certificate databases,” which record a one-time event without updates, nor the “federal Social Security” and “Internal Revenue Service databases,” which lack “biometric information.”

Should government know this much about us simply because we drive cars we own on roads we pay for? n

Janet Napolitano finds herself in an awkward spot: as Arizona’s governor, she condemned REAL ID. But as Obama’s secretary of Homeland Security, she endorses its twin, PASS ID.

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ZIGNEGO READY MIX, INC.W226 N2940 DUPLAINVILLE ROAD

WAUKESHA, WI 53186262-542-0333

by James Perloff

Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, by Steve Milloy, Wash-ington, D.C.: Regnery, 2009, 294 pages, hardcover, $27.95.

The environmental movement, bent on regulating America under its green thumb, has such a vast array

of lobbying groups, proposed measures, and specialized terminology, that it is dif-ficult for busy Americans who are wary of this movement to stay current with the de-

bate. To the rescue comes Steve Milloy’s Green Hell. At 294 pages, it is not ency-clopedic, but just the right length to bring readers up to date on the methodologies, motives, and fallacies of this movement, and how to combat it.

Green GuiltThe core environmental “danger” greens currently discuss is global warming, alleg-edly caused by man-made carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, greens do not wish to toler-ate debate on the subject. Many scientists have refuted the claims of global-warm-ing alarmists. Over 31,000 scientists have signed a petition denying those claims (www.petitionproject.org). Carbon diox-ide is a naturally occurring substance re-quired by plants, and man’s contributions to carbon dioxide levels are negligible. Nevertheless, greens do not wish to toler-ate debate on the subject. Even Al Gore, environmentalism’s leading pop guru, re-fuses to debate global warming.

One of the green groups Milloy points to is the Institute for Public Policy Research, a British think tank, which strategizes:

The task of climate change agen-cies is not to persuade by rational argument.... The “facts” need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken.... It amounts to treating climate-friendly activity as a brand that can be sold. This is, we believe, the route to mass behaviour changes.

Milloy also cites Cristine Russell, presi-dent of the Council for the Advancement of Science, who wishes to drown out crit-ics. Russell writes that “the era of ‘equal time’ for skeptics who argue that global warming is just a result of natural varia-tion and not human intervention seems to be largely over.... The he-said, she-said reporting just won’t do.”

David Roberts, a writer for Grist Mag-azine, went even further, calling for “war crimes trials” for those who deny glob-al warming, and “some sort of climate Nuremberg,” although he later retracted

the proposal. Similar recommendations come from NASA’s James Hansen, who said that coal- and oil-company execu-tives who cast doubts on global warming “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.” In short, if greens have their way, just presenting the facts refuting global warming might be classi-fied as a hate crime against the planet.

It has been a hallmark of true science that any theory be subject to objective test-ing and examination. Greens’ refusal to allow open discussion of global warming’s validity — except by themselves — is vir-tually an admission that their viewpoint is indefensible. What then, is the greens’ real motive?

Green GovernanceMilloy insightfully notes the common denominators of all green demands: in-creased government regulation, reduced economic productivity, and a lower stan-dard of living for Americans.

Greens argue that each human being has a “carbon footprint” — the amount of carbon emissions his lifestyle creates by driving cars, using electricity, etc. If a person’s carbon footprint is too great, radi-cal greens want the government to penal-ize that person. This, if the greens prevail, would entail energy rationing.

A proposal made by the California En-ergy Commission in 2007 would have required homes to have “programmable control thermostats” by which utility of-ficials could, by remote control, regulate home thermostats, water heaters, refrigera-tors, and lights to ensure consumers stayed within acceptable boundaries of energy use. Though the proposal was rejected, it dem-onstrated the degree to which greens will go to establish a “green Big Brother.”

In the meantime, the British government is conducting trials with “smart meters” that set off alarms when homes exceed al-lotted electricity limits. In Pennsylvania,

Exposing thE grEEn World ordEr

James Perloff is the author of The Shadows of Power:

The Council on Foreign Relations and the American

Decline and Tornado in a Junkyard: The Relentless

Myth of Darwinism.


Book review

Steve Milloy, the founder of junkscience.com, makes a case that Americans are on a “green” slide toward authoritarian regulations and pauperism.

Governor Ed Rendell has okayed a law requiring utility companies to cut their customers’ annual electricity consumption by one percent by May 2011, or be fined up to $20 million. In Marburg, Germany, as of 2008, new homes are required to in-clude solar panels or face fines of $1,500. And that same year, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome proposed that citizens who mix recyclables with their regular trash be fined up to $1,000.

If greens were truly interested in im-proving energy resources, they should sup-port viable alternatives — such as nuclear power, which creates no carbon emissions. Yet greens oppose it, and as Milloy docu-ments, in many cases they have even ob-structed the building of the highly touted “renewable energy” sources such as wind,

solar, and biofuels, claim-ing that each has its own negative impact on the en-vironment. What, then, is the real green agenda?

Energy is required for all activity. By opposing all forms of substantial energy development, from offshore drilling to nuclear power, greens are creating an artifi-cial energy shortage, drasti-cally increasing the cost of energy, and providing an

excuse for the government to micro-regu-late every home in Orwellian fashion. And, since global warming is seen as a “global” threat, it is also being used as an excuse for world government. Former French Presi-dent Jacques Chirac said in a speech advo-cating the Kyoto Protocol:

For the first time, humanity is insti-tuting a genuine instrument of global governance, one that should find a place within the World Environmen-tal Organization which France and the European Union would like to see established.

origins of the Green iron Fist?Though not mentioned by Milloy, Report from Iron Mountain, published in 1967 as

the leaked findings of a private three-year study commissioned by the U.S. govern-ment, may shed light on this. The report made shocking recommendations, some of which are now becoming reality. The establishment press denounced the report as a hoax; five years later, the late Leonard C. Lewin proclaimed he had written it as a satire on government think tanks. For a satire, however, it was strangely devoid of humor. Many wonder if the “hoax” charge was issued for damage control.

The study chiefly discussed the implica-tions of the world moving from the system of war — which nuclear weapons were making impractical — to disarmament. The report cited many advantages to war, one of which was allegiance by citizens to their government:

In general, the war system provides the basic motivation for primary social motivation. In doing so, it re-flects on the societal level the incen-tives of individual human behavior. The most important of these, for so-cial purposes, is the individual psy-chological rationale for allegiance to a society [read: government] and its values. Allegiance requires a cause; a cause requires an enemy. This much is obvious; the critical point is that the enemy that defines the cause must seem genuinely formidable.

The report noted that if wars disappeared due to the advent of nuclear weapons, a new “enemy” would be required to induce citizen allegiance. Among the solutions proposed were threats to the environment:

Nevertheless, an effective politi-cal substitute for war would require “alternate enemies,” some of which might seem equally farfetched in the context of the current war system. It may be, for instance, that gross pol-lution of the environment can even-tually replace the possibility of mass destruction by nuclear weapons as the principal apparent threat to the survival of the species. Poisoning of the air, and of the principal sources of food and water supply, is already well advanced, and at first glance would seem promising in this respect; it constitutes a threat that can be dealt

A proposal made by the California Energy Commission in 2007 would have required homes to have “programmable control thermostats” by which utility officials could, by remote control, regulate home thermostats, water heaters, refrigerators, and lights to ensure consumers stayed within acceptable boundaries of energy use.

Use it or lose (cash): In parts of Germany, new homes must install solar panels or face a $1,500 fine — this even though the cost of the solar panels and their upkeep may be more than the homeowner can recoup in energy savings.

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Book review

with only through social organization and political power. But from present indications it will be a generation to a generation and a half before envi-ronmental pollution, however severe, will be sufficiently menacing, on a global scale, to offer a possible basis for a solution.

It is true that the rate of pollution could be increased selectively for this purpose; in fact, the mere modifying of existing programs for the deter-rence of pollution could speed up the process enough to make the threat credible much sooner.

Was this the green movement’s beginning? In the report’s wake, numerous environ-mental scares were raised: acid rain, over-population, ozone depletion, toxic waste, deforestation, endangered species, global warming, etc. Establishment foundations began pouring billions of dollars into envi-ronmental groups. (For a listing, see “Be-hind the Green Curtain” in the April 4, 2005 issue of The New AmericAN.) Indeed, as Milloy notes, “The ten largest green groups had revenues of more than $1.36 billion in 2007 and net assets in excess of $7.1 bil-lion.” Contrary to media spin, environmen-talism is not a “grass-roots movement.”

And as Milloy observes, the restricted living standards greens advocate are not meant for the green elite, but for the rest of

us. Just two of the examples he gives: al-though Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has stated that “California will be a leader in the fight against global warming,” he spends three hours a day commuting to and from work in his own private jet — which, according to the Los Angeles Times, “does nearly as much harm to the environment in one hour as a small car in one year.” Al Gore’s Nashville mansion, which includes a heated pool house, consumes more than 20 times the electricity used by the aver-age American home. And while Gore has belatedly added some environmentally friendly energy sources, such as solar pan-els and wind turbines, this is easily afford-able for him since his net worth had grown to over $100 million by 2007.

Broad DestructionMilloy documents a host of other harm-ful aspects to the green movement. Ex-amples:

• Green opposition to DDT has led to millions of malaria deaths in Africa.

• Greens advocate population reduction since each person has a “carbon footprint” and is seen as a liability to the planet.

• Greens want cars to run on alternative energy. This not only drives up the cost of automobile ownership, but since the easi-est way for car manufacturers to meet new, higher mileage standards is to make cars lighter, car safety is also reduced.

• Greens have opposed forest cleanups, resulting in costly, deadly forest fires.

• Although water is the Earth’s most abundant substance, greens want even its use restricted and regulated. As Milloy notes: “There’s World Toilet Organization founder Jack Sims, who pronounced the flushing toilet to be ‘unsustainable’ at the 2008 World Toilet Summit. Conference at-tendees called for various solutions such as … a ‘toilet tax’ to discourage flushing.”

• Even national defense is not exempt. In 2005, the Natural Resources Defense Council sued the U.S. Navy for conducting exercises using sonar — vital for detecting enemy subs — based on the unsupported claim that the exercises disturbed whales and other marine animals. The Supreme Court sided with the Navy, but only by a 5-4 majority.

• Many American school children, heavily indoctrinated in environmental “doomed planet” scenarios, are growing depressed about the future.

And Milloy projects that, under Barack Obama, the “green president,” things are apt to get much worse.

answersMilloy doesn’t just report the problem; he also presents solutions: educating the public (most of whom are more concerned about rising energy costs than global warming); lobbying legislators; shareholder activism to press corporations into reversing green compliance that reduces shareholder value; letters to the editor; Internet activism; and more. Milloy’s own website, www.junk science.com, is one of the best out there for debunking the greens.

We wouldn’t necessarily agree with every point in Milloy’s book. For exam-ple, he criticizes greens who have opposed vaccinations. However, growing numbers of individuals completely outside the green movement also oppose mandatory vaccinations, believing that their risks outweigh their alleged benefits and that they constitute an unwelcome intrusion of government into private life. Many out-side the green movement would also not share Milloy’s confidence in genetically altered foods.

Nevertheless, Steve Milloy has written a clear, concise, up-to-date refutation of the green movement that belongs in any home library. n

snapshot of an agenda: Environmental groups, working in tandem with the UN, have made it difficult for Africans to get or have the political willingness to use the insecticide DDT. The policy has resulted in nearly a million malaria deaths a year.

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I S A I A H 4 0 : 3 1

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Honest HousekeeperHerlinda Gillam is a new employee for Aramark, a professional-services compa-ny that provides cleaning services to the healthcare industry and whose employee-training motto is “Integrity in all we do.” On May 26, Gillam had a chance to put that motto into action.

The Valley Morning Star of Harlingen, Texas, reported on July 5 that Gillam had been employed at Valley Baptist Medical Center in Harlingen for only two weeks when she happened upon two envelopes in the ladies’ restroom — containing $11,000 in cash. Being a very busy public restroom, it would have been easy to just keep the cash without raising any suspicion. But in-stead Gillam did the right thing and turned it in to her supervisor.

Gillam, a widow, very briefly thought, “Well, like, I need tires. I could take it with me, then. But I said no, I’ll take it back, because somebody might need it.... It crossed my mind, wondering who left the money behind here. It had to be, like, an old lady.... A lot of people said I should have kept it. But I said, no. It was my job to hand it to the supervisor.”

The owner of the cash returned to the hospital to look for the money, and was extremely relieved that it had been found and turned in. It was to be used for prop-erty taxes.

For her honesty, Gillam was recognized at a meeting of hospital supervisors and has been nominated for Valley Baptist’s Help-ing Heroes award. In spite of that, though, she remains very humble. “She doesn’t consider what she did special,” related Chuck Reynolds, the hospital’s vice presi-dent for Aramark services. “She told me she did what she thought was right … and the way she would want to be treated.”

christmas in July, Part 1Operation Christmas Child (OCC) is a missions project of Samaritan’s Purse Ministries, a worldwide evangelical minis-try led by Franklin Graham, son of famed evangelist Billy Graham. Each November, OCC collects shoeboxes filled with toys, school supplies, hygiene items, socks, etc., and distributes them at Christmastime to

needy children across the globe. Last month, OCC’s Boone, North Carolina, collection center received an early deliv-ery of Christmas boxes.

On July 18, members of the Revelation Disciples Motorcycle Ministry delivered 113 packed and wrapped boxes for the min-istry. This was the group’s first ride for Op-eration Christmas Child, and it fits right in with their goal of spreading the Gospel. “We want to share His love and to be Christ’s hands extended to people in need,” Rick Ar-rington, the group’s cofounder, said in an article posted on samaritanspurse.org.

Thirteen of the boxes were packed by Faith Christian Center Fellowship in Kern-ersville, N.C., and the rest were packed by the bikers and their families. Lynn Ar-rington, also a cofounder of the motor-cycle ministry, posted the planned ride on her blog back in March; that post garnered over $1,000 in donations, which will be used to cover the shipping charges and to purchase items for future boxes.

Before leaving the facility and riding home, the bikers and the OCC staff sur-rounded the 113 boxes and prayed for the children who will be receiving the gifts around Christmas. “God is going to use your ministry to share God’s love and the Gospel with many hurting children over-seas,” said April Butcher, regional manag-er for the Operation Christmas Child of-fice in Charlotte. The Revelation Disciples plan to fill more boxes and make another run in October.

christmas in July, Part 2From Krum, Texas, comes the heartwarm-ing story of a small town that pulled to-gether to celebrate Christmas in July for a young girl who may not be able to cel-ebrate it in December. Krum’s Channel 11 reported that the event on July 25, which drew more than the entire town’s popula-tion of 3,700, began with a simple ques-tion: “Daddy, when is Christmas?”

The answer was, “Soon,” and was the beginning of Shawn Richards’ preparation for an early Christmas for his daughter. You see, five-year-old Reagan has a very aggressive form of brain cancer, and fol-lowing two surgeries and seven months of

chemotherapy and radiation, doctors have given her only a few months to live.

Richards got out the family’s decorations and made it Christmas inside the house, and a few of Reagan’s neighbors decided to hold a small parade of neighborhood children on decorated bikes. But when Richards con-tacted his homeowners’ association to get permission to put up lights and decorations outside, word of the event leaked out. As Kent Rivers, a volunteer firefighter who played Santa for the celebration, told the station, “It went from a little-bitty grass fire to a Texas-size wildfire.”

And indeed it did. The small parade evolved into a grand party and a procession involving 50-60 community groups, 11 fire departments, veterans groups, cheer-leaders, over 100 motorcyclists, police of-ficers, a band, floats, hot rods, and much more. The Krum fire department erected a huge banner saying “Merry Christmas Reagan,” and the party was kicked off with a CareFlight helicopter flyover.

Recovering from chemotherapy treat-ments, Reagan enjoyed the party from her bed, which had been brought outside for the occasion. There were gifts, candy, and snow cones, and a movie special-effects coordinator came all the way from Aus-tin to bring a snow machine. Dallas/Ft. Worth’s WFAA.com captured Reagan’s visits with Santa (who arrived at the end of the parade on a fire engine covered with Christmas lights), Frosty the Snowman, and a live reindeer.

Richards told the Denton Record-Chron-icle that Reagan loved the party and had a great time, and it was a great time for the participants, as well. Rivers (Santa) told the paper that just one look at Reagan made it all worthwhile for him. “When I stepped off the truck and saw her, she was beaming.”

Hopeful that Reagan may be able to celebrate Christmas twice this year, Rich-ards says the family is still “holding on to a miracle.” “Everyone, keep praying for my daughter,” he told the paper. “That’s bigger and better than everything.” But the way the whole community came together to support his daughter is something big, too, and something Shawn Richards will never forget. n

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A rielle Levin Becker of the Washing-ton Post wrote about John Philip Sousa’s professional stature as re-

gards his past association with the Marine Corps Band:

If there’s any question about the place Sousa has in the band’s memory, a visit to the director’s office settles any doubts. Sousa is immortalized in four photographs and paintings, including one of him in a Navy uniform, and perhaps in a fifth — there is specula-tion that, in the front row of a Civil War-era photograph of the band, a young Sousa is hiding between two trombone players.

The baton that [departing U.S. Marine band director Timothy] Foley passed to [new band director Mi-chael] Colburn was given to Sousa in 1892 and bears his name in gold en-graving. Sousa’s Tiffany lamp, with a blue and green stained-glass shade decorated with outlines of fireflies, stands in a corner of the director’s of-fice. Across the room, a cabinet holds medals Sousa won for skeet shooting and other outdoor activities. The new band barracks may be named John Philip Sousa Hall.

Another Sousa portrait overlooks the room where band members often practice, an ever-present reminder of the tradition to which band members belong.

And Sousa’s renown is not limited to the Marines; it transcends all levels of soci-

ety. Every child in any school band in the United States likely knows who Sousa is and has played music Sousa composed. Most recognizable amongst his songs is “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” the song that is the official march of the United States of America. (It is so stated in the U.S. Code, Title 36, Chapter 10, by an act of Congress in 1987. This was the re-sult of a grass-roots movement that pre-sented petitions to Congress with more than 250,000 signatures in support of the legislation.)

The “March King”John Philip Sousa (1854-1932), known as the “March King,” was a composer, conductor, and patriot. Over the course of his life, he composed 140 military marches. He was born in Washington, D.C., the third of 10 children of John An-tonio Sousa (born in Spain of Portuguese

John White, the author/editor of 15 books, lives in

Cheshire, Connecticut. He is a former naval officer.

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— Past aND PersPectiveHistorYHistorY

John Philip Sousa’s entire life was devoted to music; hence, it is no surprise that his legacy in music lives on.

Sousa’s March of Greatness

John Philip sousa

parents) and Maria Elisabeth Trinkhaus (born in Bavaria). His father played trom-bone in the U.S. Marine Band, so Sousa grew up around military band music.

Sousa began his musical education around age six, studying voice, violin, piano, flute, cornet, baritone, trombone, and alto horn. His father enlisted him in the Marines at age 13 as an apprentice after he attempted to run away to join a circus band. He published his first composition,

“Moonlight on the Potomac Waltzes,” in 1872. In 1875, he was discharged from the Marines and began performing on violin, touring, and eventually conducting theater orchestras. He conducted Gilbert & Sul-livan’s H.M.S. Pinafore on Broadway.

In 1879, he married Jane van Middles-worth Bellis. The next year he returned to both the Marines and Washington to assume leadership of the U.S. Marine Corps Band, which he led for 12 years,

until 1892. During that time he also conducted “The President’s Own” Marine Corps Band, serving under Presidents Hayes, Garfield, Cleveland, Arthur, and Har-rison. After two successful but limited tours with the Marine Corps Band in 1891 and 1892, Sousa was con-vinced by promoter David Blakely to resign and orga-nize a civilian concert band.

When Sousa resigned from his second stint in the U.S. Marine Corps, he gave a farewell concert on the White House lawn. An engraved baton was presented to him. That baton was given back to the Marine Corps after Sousa’s death by his daughters and is now traditionally passed to the new director of the Marine Band upon assumption of the duties.

In 1881, Sousa became a Freemason and remained so for 51 years of his life. One of the marches he composed, “Nobles of the Mystic Shrine,” is dedicated to the Shriners.

The first Sousa Band concert was per-formed in 1892. The band became Amer-ica’s first superstar band. It was the first to go on a world tour, the first to log more than one million miles, and the first to per-form before one million listeners.

Sousa continued his successful career to the end of his life in 1932, making Euro-pean and world tours. During World War I, at age 62, Sousa joined the U.S. Naval Reserve (at the symbolic salary of $1 a year) and was assigned the rank of lieuten-ant. He trained Navy bandsmen and took a band of recruits on tour to raise money for war causes. After the war he contin-ued to tour with his band. He composed many of today’s popular marches, includ-ing “Semper Fidelis,” “El Capitan,” and “Washington Post.” He championed the cause of music education, received several honorary degrees, and fought for compos-ers’ rights, testifying before Congress in 1927 and 1928. The sousaphone, designed by Sousa in 1899, continues to be a vibrant part of marching bands.

“The Stars and Stripes Forever”In late 1896, Sousa and his wife went to Europe on vacation. While there, he re-ceived word that David Blakely, who had become manager of the Sousa Band, had died suddenly. The band was scheduled to begin another cross-country tour soon, and Sousa knew he must return to America at once to take over the band’s business af-fairs. Sousa tells the rest of the story in his autobiography Marching Along:

Here came one of the most vivid inci-dents of my career. As the vessel [the Teutonic] steamed out of the harbor I was pacing on the deck, absorbed in thoughts of my manager’s death

When Sousa was asked late in his career what single piece of music he would choose to hear just before he died, he replied: “‘The Stars and Stripes Forever,’ I would meet my Maker face to face with the inspiration that grows from its melodies and the patriotism that gives it meaning.”

John Philip sousa marching in front of the Great lakes Navy Band.

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and the many duties and deci-sions which awaited me in New York. Suddenly, I began to sense a rhythmic beat of a band play-ing within my brain. Through-out the whole tense voyage, that imaginary band continued to unfold the same themes, echo-ing and re-echoing the most dis-tinct melody. I did not transfer a note of that music to paper while I was on the steamer, but when we reached shore, I set down the measures that my brain-band had been playing for me, and not a note of it has ever changed.

It was Christmas Day, 1896. The composition: “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

Sousa’s Later Life Sousa, a man of letters and author of several books, also wrote words for “The Stars and Stripes Forever” (see below). The march was an im-mediate success, and Sousa’s band played it at almost every concert until his death more than 25 years later. Veteran Sousa musicians said that it was always an inspiring experience to play the piece because, despite hundreds of repetitions, the tearful and heartfelt patriotic fervor commu-nicated by the audiences to the musicians never seemed to fail.

Sousa said he had been born “in the shadow of the Capitol dome,” and as he witnessed the sights and sounds of Civil War activities, his love of America grew. He loved his country with a passion seldom demonstrated more eloquently, and described his occupation as “a salesman of Ameri-canism.” At all of his 15,000 concerts, there was a sense of patriotism. He was described as the “Pied Piper of Patriotism.” Late in his career, he was asked what single piece of music he would choose to hear just before he died. He replied, “‘The Stars and Stripes Forever.’ I would meet my Maker face to face with the inspiration that grows from its melodies and the patriotism that gives it meaning.”

A few days before his death, Sousa said to his friend, Dr. James Francis Cooke, editor of the famous music magazine The Etude, “I believe firmly in God. The trouble with modernistic music today is that it is written by men who don’t believe in any kind of God. That is the reason why it won’t last. Only that lasts which comes from God.... All of my music, all of my melodies are not of my own making; no matter how light, they come from a higher source. I have listened to a higher power.”

Sousa died of a heart attack on March 6, 1932 at age 77 in Reading, Pennsylvania, after conducting a band rehearsal. The last piece he con-ducted was “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” It is considered by many to be the finest march ever written. The remains of America’s most famous and beloved bandmaster were taken by train to Washington, D.C., where he lay in state for public viewing in the Marine Band auditorium and then was buried in Congressional Cemetery with military and Masonic honors. Thousands lined the curb to pay their last respects.

A statue of Sousa now stands at the Marine barracks building in Wash-ington, D.C., one block from the home where he was born. n

Let martial note in triumph floatAnd liberty extend its mighty handA flag appears ’mid thunderous cheers,The banner of the Western land.The emblem of the brave and trueIts folds protect no tyrant crew;The red and white and starry blueIs freedom’s shield and hope.

Other nations may deem their flags the bestAnd cheer them with fervid elationBut the flag of the North and South and WestIs the flag of flags, the flag of Freedom’s nation.

Hurrah for the flag of the free!May it wave as our standard forever,The gem of the land and the sea,The banner of the right.Let despots remember the dayWhen our fathers with mighty endeavorProclaimed as they marched to the frayThat by their might and by their rightIt waves forever.

Let eagle shriek from lofty peakThe never-ending watchword of our land;Let summer breeze waft through the treesThe echo of the chorus grand.Sing out for liberty and light,Sing out for freedom and the right.Sing out for Union and its might,O patriotic sons.

Other nations may deem their flags the bestAnd cheer them with fervid elation,But the flag of the North and South and WestIs the flag of flags, the flag of Freedom’s nation.

Hurrah for the flag of the free.May it wave as our standard foreverThe gem of the land and the sea,The banner of the right.Let despots remember the dayWhen our fathers with mighty endeavorProclaimed as they marched to the fray,That by their might and by their rightIt waves forever. n

Here are the words to “ The Stars and

Stripes Forever.”

John Philip sousa

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Don’t Give Him any lipIn Port Allen, Louisiana, Roderick Porter and an accomplice by the name of Dean Favron, who had just finished serving nearly seven years in prison for aggravated assault on a Baton Rouge police officer and two carjackings, came to an apartment for unknown reasons, according to the local news. At first they yelled for the occupants inside to open up. On the other side of the door were a 10-year-old boy and his eight-year-old sister, who were understandably upset as they stood trembling in fear. They were home alone and two grown men sud-denly began angrily banging on the door demanding to be let in. Porter and Favron allegedly escalated the situation by kick-ing at the door until it burst inward.

The 10-year-old boy reacted by herald-ing his sister to their mother’s room, where he knew Mom kept her gun. They hid in the bedroom, and the young boy grabbed his mother’s gun. As the child’s mother later explained to CBS affiliate WAFB, “He did what I told him to do.… Thank God he did.” As Porter and Favron threw open the door, the 10-year-old fired a sin-gle shot into Porter’s lip.

The two home invaders were quick learners: they immediately took off and sought medical attention. Both men are being held on $150,000 bond and will soon appear before a judge.

First shot in 25 YearsSelf-defense knows no age limits appar-ently, as 82-year-old veteran Bradley Har-vell of Bristol, Florida, exemplifies. Brad-ley owned a .357 magnum for 25 years and had never fired it, but that changed when a man barged into his home and zapped him twice with a stun gun. Bradley fired the gun for the first and second time that night, and those two shots claimed the life of the oddly dressed home invader. The alleged assailant, 24-year-old Octavius Barnes, was described by local deputies as being dressed “like a ninja.” The deputy sheriff explained to the Tallahassee Democrat that under state law, “the Castle Doctrine allows you to defend yourself with like force if someone comes on your property, but it has to be a reasonable amount of

force that was used against you for you to protect yourself or your family.”

After having something to eat, Harvell had gone to bed for the night only to be awoken by someone knocking at his door. When he answered the door, the assailant allegedly forced his way in and shocked him with a stun gun in both the arm and stomach. The invader then brandished what appeared to be a pistol and demanded money. Bradley gave him what cash he had available, but when the intruder pressed him for more, Bradley reached among some scattered papers and retrieved his magnum. The first shot hit the trespasser in the stomach, the second in the head.

When asked about his actions, Harvell said, “I did what I did to try and save my-self,” and added, “I’m 82 years old. I’ve made it this far, and I want to keep on living.”

right to “Bear” armsIn Grants Pass, Oregon, a man was wrenched from sleep in the middle of the night by his daughter’s screaming. Imag-ine his surprise when he discovered that the source of her terror was a bear that had climbed through her window! The fa-ther quickly reacted and fired a shotgun at the beast. Bears are notorious for their strength and durability, and this creature was no exception. “I shot him once with the gun and that didn’t bother him” the man told CBS affiliate KTVL. A second and third shot still did not finish the job, but three more blasts finally took their toll and the animal collapsed.

60 Minutes exchangeIn a 60 Minutes report entitled “Gun Sales: Will the Loop Hole Close?” jour-nalist Leslie Stahl advocated for further restrictions on purchasing weapons. Stahl started the report by discussing the spike in gun sales, which began with the election of Barack Obama to the office of presi-dent, as being driven by paranoia created by gun lobbies. Later in the report, Stahl had a rather interesting conversation with an informed gun-rights advocate by the name of Philip Van Cleave, who is the

president of Virginia’s largest gun-rights group. After trying to tie the Virginia Tech (VT) massacre to the ability to purchase weapons at gun shows from private sell-ers without the federal background check (even though that was not how the VT murderer acquired his weapons — he did in fact have a federal background check), Stahl asked Van Cleave if he thought the VT murders proved there is a need for stricter gun control. Stahl was taken aback by his response.

“If just one student 21 or older had a per-mit and had been armed that day — I mean the first time a police officer showed up, they didn’t even fire a shot. He saw the po-lice coming, he killed himself. It was over. The first time somebody would’ve been able to show him resistance, it would’ve stopped him. I’m convinced he would’ve killed himself and probably saved a whole bunch of lives at that point,” Van Cleave responded.

A stunned Stahl questioned, “Arming all those young people…?”

“Wonder who’s fighting in Iraq for us right now?” Van Cleave answered.

Stahl, who has no compunctions about arming the young as long as it is in service to the state, tried to return the debate back to the VT killing example. “But you know, you could have a lot of them be like Cho (the VT shooter),” she argued.

“If they do, there will be plenty of other ... people there to make sure that he doesn’t get very far,” Van Cleave replied.

Another interesting exchange from the report was between Stahl and Sena-tor Dianne Feinstein regarding President Obama’s decision not to pursue new gun-control measures at this time because of the political consequences. “There’s some sense that the president has so many crisis issues on his plate right now that the idea of bringing up guns — which is consid-ered part of the Culture Wars — would be such a diversion,” Stahl said to Feinstein.

“I agree with you. I wouldn’t bring it up now,” she answered, but assured Stahl that eventually it will be pushed. “I’ll pick the time and the place, no question about that.” Statements like that, and not the gun lob-bies, are what’s driving the “paranoia.” n

— pATrick krey

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washington Gives Us the treatment Item: The New York Times for July 30 reported that the White House and other supporters of overhauling the U.S. health-care system are being met by resistance, charging that this legislative move is a “risky experiment” or “a government takeover of health care that would prevent people from choosing their own doctors.” President Barack Obama “is making an intense effort to rebut those claims. On Wednesday, he flew to Raleigh, N.C., for a town-hall-style meeting to address the kinds of public concerns reflected in the poll results.”

“‘First of all,’ Mr. Obama said, ‘no-body is talking about some government takeover of health care. I’m tired of hear-ing that. I have been as clear as I can be. Under the reform I’ve proposed, if you like your doctor, you keep your doctor; if you like your health care plan, you keep your health care plan. These folks need to stop scaring everybody, you know?’”Item: Syndicated columnist Paul Krug-man, writing in the Salt Lake Tribune for July 31, argued that, in the United States, “government involvement is the only rea-son our [healthcare] system works at all.” If you “currently have decent health insur-ance, thank the government.”

Krugman continued:

Right-wing opponents of reform would have you believe that Obama is a wild-eyed socialist, attacking the free market. But unregulated markets don’t work for health care — never have, never will. To the extent we have a working health care system at all right now it’s only because the government covers the elderly, while a combination of regulation and tax subsidies makes it possible for many, but not all, nonelderly Americans to get decent private coverage.

Now Obama proposes using ad-ditional regulation and subsidies to make decent insurance available to all of us. That’s not radical; it’s as American as, well, Medicare.

CorreCtIon: If you ran across a mam-moth sinkhole into which people were being forced to throw tax dollars — let’s call it Medicare and note that the govern-ment itself says it faces bankruptcy in one short decade — would it occur to you to fix the situation by blasting that hole even deeper and coercing additional workers to shovel in greenbacks even faster? And then try to convince those doing the work that this would be a good way to save money?

Well, you might if you were the presi-dent or another supporter of nationalized healthcare. You might also blame the mak-ers of the shovels for the situation in the same fashion the “evil” insurance indus-try is being portrayed as the villain in the current reform frenzy. Or you could try to shift the subject to those doing the shovel-ing, faulting them for being, say, too obese to fill in the pit caused by the explosion of mandated government spending.

The current healthcare system in this country has plenty of faults, but it’s been proven time and again that there is no problem so grave that more government intervention can’t make it even worse.

Searching for scapegoats, the president is calling out as scaremongers those who won’t fall into line behind the passage of his hugely expensive legislation — costing the equivalent of the entire Brazilian econ-

omy. The bill being worked on in Washing-ton runs to about a billion dollars a page — and represents more than the outlays of the entire U.S. government as late as 1986 or 1994 (depending on which of the shifting pieces of legislation are involved).

How is the president making his case? With well-reasoned facts? Nope. He’s doing it by trying to frighten the bejabbers out of the public. The president has even charged that many doctors now perform tonsillectomies that aren’t needed, pre-sumably to drive up their payments. One gathers that this will change when bureau-crats are calling the shots.

Right after his railing against those advising caution, because, supposedly, those opposed to Obamacare are merely trying to scare the public, Obama himself resorted to scare tactics. If the nation fails to act, he divined, “I can almost guaran-tee you your premiums will double over the next 10 years,” and you may not get a raise at your job to boot. The president keeps saying, for example: “If we do not reform health care, your premiums and out-of-pocket costs will continue to sky-rocket. If we do not act, 14,000 Ameri-cans will continue to lose their health insurance every single day. These are the consequences of inaction.” (Of course, Obama doesn’t explain that the 14,000

Handling healthcare: Demonstrators face off in Lincoln, Nebraska, over Obama’s proposed healthcare plans. Those for Obama’s plans usually maintain that government can provide inexpensive, all-encompassing healthcare. Those against usually point out that present government intervention in healthcare is failing and that socialized healthcare around the world is failing.

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“losing their health insurance” are mainly victims of other government malfeasance that has cratered the economy, such as job losses caused by government-subsidized immigrant workers and U.S. regulatory compliance costs that in 2006 were 31.7 percent higher than those of our nine largest trading partners.)

Yet, supporters of the president’s re-forms are advocating legislation that will tend to force employers away from pro-viding healthcare benefits. Indeed, should you lose such benefits, the Democrats have also proposed that you not be able to buy a new private policy because they want you in a public plan.

If you really want what amounts to a nationalized, government-run HMO, you’ll love the Democrats’ plans, which would lead to long lines, high costs, more taxes, and rationed care.

That is the considered view of many in the profession willing to look beyond the rhetoric in Washington. “This is war,” commented George Watson, the president-elect of the Association of American Phy-sicians and Surgeons. “This is a bureau-cratic boondoggle to grab control of health care. Everything that has been proposed in the 1,018 page-bill will contribute to the ruination of medicine.” The doctor noted that the legislation is crammed with rules and regulations that will result in shoddy care and lengthy waiting lines. A provision that would coerce doctors who contracted with Medicare into the nationalized plan is a “trap” that he compared to “involuntary servitude.”

The White House disputes all of this of course. The president has praised the Mayo Clinic, among others, as a model for the nation, lauding its high-quality care “at costs well below the national norm.” From his enthusiasm, you might think that his administration was itself responsible for such success. The reality is a bit different. “The Mayo Clinic and 12 other top health-care-delivery outlets just sent Congress a letter,” wrote Grace-Marie Turner, presi-dent of the Galen Institute, in the New York Post, “warning that the bill that already has passed two committees in the House would put them out of business.”

Do we really want healthcare run by those who have displayed the efficiency of the DMV and Postal Service and the compassion of the IRS? After all, the gov-ernment already has a track record. Do we want to empower on a larger scale those who have been administering the long-suf-fering VA and Indian Health services and who have pushed Medicare and Medicaid to the brink of insolvency and beyond? Still, Time magazine asks plaintively in its recent cover story, “Can Obama Find a Cure?” as if the former community orga-nizer were a medical research scientist on the verge of some grand discovery.

The government does not want true pri-vate competition. Indeed, ever-dependable columnist Krugman declares it impossible to have free-market healthcare. Yet, the consequences of the proposed public al-ternative, in rather short order, would not be pretty. Writes Michael Cannon, direc-tor of health policies studies at the Cato Institute:

After the Congressional Budget Of-fice estimated that as many as 15 million Americans could lose their existing coverage under Senator Kennedy’s legislation, the Associated Press reported, “White House offi-cials suggest the president’s rhetoric

[about being able to keep your plan, no matter what] shouldn’t be taken literally.”

Indeed, a new government program would literally oust millions of Amer-icans from their current health plans and threaten their relationships with their doctors, as employers choose to drop their current employee health plans and as private health plans close down. A Lewin Group analysis esti-mated that Obama’s campaign pro-posal would move 32 million Ameri-cans into a new government-run plan. Lewin subsequently estimated that if Congress used Medicare’s price con-trols and opened the new program to everyone, it could pull 120 million Americans out of private insurance — more than half of the private mar-ket. The share of Americans who de-pend on government for their health care would rise from just over one-quarter to two-thirds.

The reformers have their eye fixed on more than bringing down the insurance industry. Big-government advocates literally want to run our lives — for our own good, of course. They are also willing to tax almost anything to herd us around as they so de-sire. Consider an all-too-typical example,


from a healthcare blog in the Los Ange-les Times for July 27. The piece, called “Tough love for fat people: Tax their food to pay for healthcare,” urged the United States to “adopt extensive menu- and food-labeling changes that would make ‘good foods’ easily distinguishable from the bad ones subject to added taxes. Not to worry though: Several European countries, most notably Great Britain, have led the way in this area.”

Yes, that’s the same no-so-great Britain where the Orwellian-nicknamed National Institute for Health and Clinical Excel-lence (NICE) board decides what treat-ments should be funded by the govern-ment based on an accounting statistic that measures, in terms of pounds, how much your life is worth.

Nevertheless, continued the Los Ange-les Times do-gooder:

And here’s the payoff: Conserva-tively estimated, a 10% tax levied on foods that would be defined as “less healthy” by a national standard ad-opted recently in Great Britain could yield $240 billion in its first five years and $522 billion over 10 years of implementation — if it were to begin in October 2010. If lawmakers instituted a program of tax subsidies

to encourage the purchase of fresh and processed fruits and vegetables, the added revenue would still be $356 billion over 10 years.

Meanwhile, the legislation being foisted on the public has a lot in it other than what treat-ments you might be allowed. The Associa-tion of American Physicians and Surgeons has noted that there are even provisions for home visits that could provide paren-tal counseling with Washington’s wishes about “increasing birth intervals between pregnancies” — which probably translates quite easily into Chinese since it sounds suspiciously like Beijing’s program.

Collectivism is key to Washington’s legislative occupation of what should be personal business. Intrusive and expensive government, contrary to columnist Krug-man, is actually behind virtually all of the ills of the system. As Sheldon Richman explained in an article for the Foundation for Economic Education:

Nearly every aspect of medicine and health insurance that the politicians say needs fixing is the result of politi-cians’ previous attempts to fix some-thing. Much of the escalation of pric-es comes from consumer demand that is freed from normal cost constraints

thanks to third-party payers: govern-ment-privileged insurance companies, Medicare, and Medicaid. While that intervention boosts demand by elimi-nating cost consciousness, others con-strict supply: occupational licensing, insurance mandates and barriers to entry, patents on drugs and devices, FDA regulations, certificate-of-need requirements, and more.

With each so-called reform, we (in reality, they, the politicians) made things worse. It’s time we — collectively — stopped trying to reinvent the medical and insurance industries. Instead that task should be left to us individually — acting, transacting, competing, and cooper-ating in the marketplace. Only then will solutions emerge from people’s — not politicians’ — choices, as entrepreneurs (neither aided nor im-peded by the State) pursue profit by producing goods and services that make us better off.

The reforms that are really needed in-volve less government, not more. Yet, the prescription being written for the United States by Dr. Obama and his congressional orderlies would insinuate Washington even deeper into healthcare matters. It would cost us in many ways. The added tax bur-den would be both direct and indirect. One method of financing in the House version of the legislation is what amounts to a jobs tax; the business levy would hurt those the reformers profess they want to help. Those workers who might “gain health in-surance from ObamaCare,” observed the Wall Street Journal, “will pay the steepest price for it in either a shrinking pay check, or no job at all.”

That knock on the door is ominous; it’s a snake-oil salesman from Washington who says he’s got a cure-all. The govern-ment will simply lend a hand, we are told. We’ve been sold that bill of goods before. It is a mistake to believe, as proven by long, repeated, and painful experience, that Uncle Sam can open his wallet and let you keep yours closed. n

— williAm p. hoAr

a sales pitch: President Barack Obama frequently “sells” his healthcare plans. Democrats’ plans have gaping logical holes: they don’t explain how government can insure more people and improve care when many doctors already don’t take patients with Medicare and SCHIP because the doctors lose money.

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The “cash for clunkers” program is supposedly wildly successful. Ac-

cording to proponents, con-sumers are spending money once again on expensive, big-ticket items; gas-guzzlers are being removed from the road; and new-car sales are soaring, benefiting not just the auto-mobile manufacturers, but the economy as a whole.

As just about everybody in America now knows, consum-ers can receive federal rebates of up to $4,500 by trading in their old, fuel-inefficient cars for new, more fuel-efficient ones. So many consumers jumped at the opportunity to take advantage of this government enticement that the $1 billion Congress initially authorized for the program was almost totally exhausted by the first week’s worth of rebates, causing politicians who equated “consumer participation” with “success” to scramble to provide another $2 billion for the program. That latest installment of funds should keep the program on the road through Labor Day, the Obama administration, a strong advocate of the program, says.

But is the extent of consumer participation and the money they spend the best way to measure the success of the “cash for clunk-ers” program? Consumers participate, of course, because they are able to get more money for their old cars than the old cars are worth — in many cases thousands of dollars more. So that means that the government enticements benefit the economy, right? Well, if that were the case, then why not sweeten the government-subsi-dized deals? Wouldn’t that benefit the economy even more?

Obviously, even more consumers would participate in the “cash for clunkers” program if the rebates were bigger, or if the definition of “clunkers” were extended to cover a larger number of used cars. Just think of how many more cars Detroit could produce and sell if the federal rebates were increased to (say) $10,000 and then applied to any deal where the difference in gas mileage between the sale of a “clunker” and the purchase of a new car were just one mile per gallon or more! Wouldn’t such a turbo-charged “cash for clunkers” program generate even more car sales than the current model?

And if a turbo-charged “cash for clunkers” program is not sufficient to jump-start the economy, then why not dispense with the “clunkers” part of the program altogether and simply give each consumer a big, fat voucher that can be redeemed when purchasing a new car (a very fuel-efficient new car, of course)? In fact, why not design the “cash for new cars” pro-gram so that the government will pay for the full amount of

each new car purchase?Detroit would sell a lot

more cars then. In fact, Detroit would not be able to keep up, no matter how hard it strived to ramp up production. But would the resulting surge in car sales to eager consumers willing to take possession of the government-paid cars at no cost to themselves really get the economy going again?

Silly, isn’t it? Yet the only thing that makes the current “cash for clunkers” program less silly in terms of its sup-posed benefit to the economy is the fact that government is subsidizing only a part of the

cost of the deals instead of the entire amount.The government has no wealth of its own, and the money

it spends to finance the “cash for clunkers” program must be siphoned out of the economy — the very economy that the pro-gram is supposed to help. If the money for the program is bor-rowed and created out of thin air through the Federal Reserve, then the newly created dollars interjected into the economy will erode the value of already existing dollars, causing prices to rise for goods and services, including cars.

In short, the program is a wealth-redistribution scheme ben-efiting the auto industry (albeit only as long as the program is kept alive by Washington) and some consumers at the expense of the economy as a whole. There is no overall economic gain.

Well, actually, it is even worse than that, since the govern-ment is having all of the “clunkers” it is paying for destroyed, which means that the cost to the government (and ultimately the American people) is not merely the benefit the consumer derives (the difference between the market value of the cars and the value of the rebates) but the entire cost of the rebates. Sup-posedly this destruction of many still-useful vehicles will help the economy since those vehicles get lower gas mileage than the government deems advisable.

This “logic” ignores the fact that destroying goods that still possess market value can only hurt the economy. (If the op-posite were the case, then the government could also help the economy by buying and destroying older homes and factories and replacing them with new, more-efficient ones.) The “logic” also ignores the effect that the reduction in the number of used cars will have on the price of used cars (the price will go up). And it assumes that consumers do not factor in the price of gasoline when buying cars.

If this government program is a huge success, one would hate to contemplate what would constitute failure. n

Why Is “Cash for Clunkers” called a success?


tHe last worDby GAry beNoiT

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