Change is Coming

I am a student of history. Professionally, I have written 15 books in six languages, and have studied it all my life. I think there is something monumentally large afoot, and I do not believe it is just a banking crisis, or a mortgage crisis, or a credit crisis.

Yes these exist, but they are merely single facets on a very large gemstone that is only now coming into a sharper focus. Something of historic proportions is happening.

I can sense it because I know how it feels, smells, what it looks like, and how people react to it. Yes, a perfect storm may be brewing, but there is something happening within our country that has been evolving for about ten to fifteen years. The pace has dramatically quickened in the past two. We demand and then codify into law the requirement that our banks make massive loans to people we know they can never pay back? Why? We learn just days ago that the Federal Reserve, which has little or no real oversight by anyone, has "loaned" two trillion dollars (that is $2,000,000,000,000) over the past few months, but will not tell us to whom or why or disclose the terms.

That is our money. Yours and mine. And that is three times the $700B we all argued about so strenuously just this past September. Who has this money? Why do they have it? Why are the terms unavailable to us? Who asked for it? Who authorized it? I thought this was a government of "we the people," who loaned our powers to our elected leaders.

Apparently not. We have spent two or more decades intentionally de-industrializing our economy. Why? We have intentionally dumbed down our schools, ignored our history, and no longer teach our founding documents, why we are exceptional, and why we are worth preserving. Students by and large cannot write, think critically, read, or articulate.

Parents are not revolting, teachers are not picketing, school boards continue to back mediocrity. Why? We have now established the precedent of protesting every close election (now violently in California over a proposition that is so controversial that it wants marriage to remain between one man and one woman.

Did you ever think such a thing possible just a decade ago?) We have corrupted our sacred political process by allowing unelected judges to write laws that radically change our way of life, and then mainstream Marxist groups like ACORN and others to turn our voting system into a banana republic. To what purpose?

Now our mortgage industry is collapsing, housing prices are in free fall, major industries are failing, our banking system is on the verge of collapse, social security is nearly bankrupt, as is medicare and our entire government, our education system is worse than a joke (I teach college and know precisely what I am talking about) - the list is staggering in its length, breadth, and depth. It is potentially 1929 x ten.

And we are at war with an enemy we cannot name for fear of offending people of the same religion, who cannot wait to slit the throats of your children if they have the opportunity to do so.

And now we have elected a man no one knows anything about, who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, let alone a town as big as Wasilla, Alaska. All of his associations and alliances are with real radicals in their chosen fields of employment, and everything we learn about him, drip by drip, is unsettling if not downright scary (Surely you have heard him speak about his idea to create and fund a mandatory civilian defense force stronger than our military for use inside our borders?

No? Oh, of course. The media would never play that for you over and over and then demand he answer it. Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter and $150,000 wardrobe is more important.)

Mr. Obama's winning platform can be boiled down to one word: Change. Why? I have never been so afraid for my country and for my children as I am now. This man campaigned on bringing people together, something he has never, ever done in his professional life. In my assessment, Obama will divide us along philosophical lines, push us apart, and then try to realign the pieces into a new and different power structure.

Change is indeed coming. And when it comes, you will never see the same nation again. And that is only the beginning. And I thought I would never be able to experience what the ordinary, moral German felt in the mid-1930s. In those times, the savior was a former smooth-talking rabble-rouser from the streets, about whom the average German knew next to nothing.

What they did know was that he was associated with groups that shouted, shoved, and pushed around people with whom they disagreed; he edged his way onto the political stage through great oratory.

Conservative "losers" read it right now. And promises. Economic times were tough, people were losing jobs, and he was a great speaker. And he smiled and waved a lot. And people, even newspapers, were afraid to speak out for fear that his "brown shirts" would bully them into submission. And then, he was duly elected to office, a full-throttled economic crisis at hand [the Great Depression].

Slowly but surely he seized the controls of government power, department by department, person by person, bureaucracy by bureaucracy. The kids joined a Youth Movement in his name, where they were taught what to think.

How did he get the people on his side? He did it promising jobs to the jobless, money to the moneyless, and goodies for the military-industrial complex. He did it by indoctrinating the children, advocating gun control, health care for all, better wages, better jobs, and promising to re-instill pride once again in the country, across Europe , and across the world. He did it with a compliant media - did you know that? And he did this all in the name of justice and . . . change.

And the people surely got what they voted for. (Look it up if you think I am exaggerating.) Read your history books. Many people objected in 1933 and were shouted down, called names, laughed at, and made fun of.

When Winston Churchill pointed out the obvious in the late 1930s while seated in the House of Lords in England (he was not yet Prime Minister), he was booed into his seat and called a crazy troublemaker. He was right, though. Don't forget that Germany was the most educated, cultured country in Europe. It was full of music, art, museums, hospitals, laboratories, and universities. And in less than six years - a shorter time span than just two terms of the U. S. presidency - it was rounding up its own citizens, killing others, abrogating its laws, turning children against parents, and neighbors against neighbors.

All with the best of intentions, of course. The road to Hell is paved with them. As a practical thinker, one not overly prone to emotional decisions, I have a choice: I can either believe what the objective pieces of evidence tell me (even if they make me cringe with disgust); I can believe what history is shouting to me from across the chasm of seven decades; or I can hope I am wrong by closing my eyes, having another latte, and ignoring what is transpiring around me.

Some people scoff at me, others laugh, or think I am foolish, naive, or both. Perhaps I am. But I have never been afraid to look people in the eye and tell them exactly what I believe - and why I believe it. I pray I am wrong. I do not think I am. ********************************************************************************************************************* The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. Thomas Jefferson

Using the analogy, Obama probably thought he was the iceberg; but then again, Al Gore thinks he controls the weather. The Democrats seem to think that they are the Greek gods. This delusion doesn’t make them godly, however.

The truth is that Obama is an empty suit. All he knows of life he got from Bill Ayers and the Chicago machine. In the Senate he voted down the line for the left. Even Bernie Sanders, the socialist, voted with more common sense.

He surrounds himself with ivory tower academicians and Clinton functionaries, and he does what they tell him to do, because every time he comes up with an idea, they blow it more full of holes than a Swiss cheese.

But the problems he faces aren’t just extraordinarily bigger than he is, they are bigger than the entire Democrat party can face. And all the promises of largesse they have made for over 60 years are falling apart.

The very best thing the Republicans can do right now is to solidly oppose anything the Democrats do. They can’t stop the ship from sinking, but at least they can be in the rowboats.

Bush saw the catastrophe coming from a mile away, and tried to mitigate it, but the Democrat congress wouldn’t play.

I don't believe as others do about Bush causing this economic catastrophe we find ourselves in. Even some on FR seem to accept that.

It just seemed to me Bush was helpless to stop the Democrat Congress due to political considerations and the media's successful campaign to smear him to the point where he lacked any credibility to act.

The 110th Congress was responsible for the recession and it may have done so intentionally.

Truthfully, Fannie and Freddy were just the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is with little or unregulated multi-leverage markets, like derivatives. They were dealing in sums far greater than the entire world GDP, more than 10 times larger than the US national debt.

Multi-leverage is just insane. Say, you have a dime, so you use it to borrow a dollar. Then you use that dollar to borrow ten dollars, use them to borrow 100 dollars, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, million, billion. Nothing backs it up but that original dime, and all the money is good for is borrowing more money. It is like double or nothing gambling.

However, with this insanity going on, it drains money from the market at amazing speed. Money that otherwise could have been used to support the bad loans of Fannie and Freddy, and in the future still to come, could have supported the alt-a and ARM mortgages, that are 1.5 times the size of the subprime mortgages.

It also sucks money that could be used to buy Treasury bills, that would support Obama’s spending spree, and the huge returns on investments in the nation’s pension funds.

W. Bush saw the trouble developing in Fanny and Freddy, and tried to stop it, but it didn’t really matter in the long run. If anything, he is probably desperately glad to be out of office.

Some time ago, I saw an article or an email about a teacher/professor who gave a quiz to his students using the talking points of an election and they were to vote for the candidate of their choice. It turned out that most of them voted for Hitler. Can anyone point me to a copy of this?
I have searched but cannot find it. Thanks.

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