Posted on 09/02/2012 10:49:10 PM PDT by Arec Barrwin
If Only D'Souza Were Right
Mises Daily: Monday, September 03, 2012 by Gary North
by Gary North
2016: Obama's America
I went to see 2016: Obama's America. Dinesh D'Souza wrote, stars in, directed, narrates, and did the original research for it. If we look at this from the point of view of its success as a documentary, I think it is effective. It is making money in theaters. This is amazing for a documentary. It is a campaign-year documentary, and it is a good one.
It is also dead wrong. That is because it misses the fundamental political fact of the last dozen years: the Obama administration is the operational successor of the Bush administration. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo, on Wall Street, Barack Obama is George W. Bush in blackface. Obama is the star of a 21-century minstrel show.
This fact has been deliberately ignored for almost four years by both the neoconservative Right and the grin-and-bear-it Left. Neither side will admit what I regard as the fundamental fact of this documentary. It is a long whitewash of the policies of George W. Bush. The On-Budget Deficit
If you understand this early, you can see it in what is by far the best section of the movie. It appears at the end. It is an interview with the ever-eloquent David Walker, who resigned in 2008 from his job as comptroller general senior accountant of the United States.
This date is crucial: the last year of the Bush administration.
I need to make three observations. First, the deficit is vastly worse than the movie portrays. The movie sticks with the nonissue: the on-budget debt of $15 trillion, which is chump change, while never mentioning the central problem: the $222 trillion present value of the unfunded liabilities of the off-budget deficit, meaning the deficits of politically sacrosanct Social Security and Medicare. This is the heart of the federal government's highly entertaining Punch and Judy show over the deficit, with Paul Ryan as Punch and Obama cross-dressing as Judy.
Second, Walker has spent years warning the public about the unsustainable increase of the on-budget federal debt. He was eloquent on camera. But, central to that presentation is the fact that he blamed George W. Bush as much as he blamed Obama. He says on camera that the turning point on the deficit began with Bush's presidency. He showed that we are headed for a fiscal disaster, and it may overtake us during the presidency of whoever is elected in 2016.
In terms of the on-budget deficit, Obama's administration is an extension of Bush's. Dinesh D'Souza
Miss this, and you miss the whitewash. This documentary is an implicit whitewash. It relies on an assumption, namely, that we are not dealing in 2012 with a single political administration, which began in January 2001. Sadly, we are.
The key to understanding this is Timothy Geithner, who was the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank (privately owned) in 2008, and is the secretary of the Treasury now. He does not appear in the documentary.
Third, neither Walker nor D'Souza mentions on-screen what should be the obvious constitutional fact namely, that it is the Congress that legally initiates all spending bills, and it is the House of Representatives that holds the hammer constitutionally. There was not one word in the movie about the Congress of the United States as being constitutionally in authority over the budget of the United States government. How in the world could anyone make a documentary that focuses at the very end on the central problem that the country faces, and then try to pin the tail on Obama as the donkey?
We are living in a bipartisan, congressionally mandated, slow-motion train wreck. The Congress of the United States could stop Obama today as easily as it could have stopped Bush. Congress is not interested in stopping the deficit; it is interested in avoiding all responsibility for the annual $1.2 trillion on-budget disaster that is the federal budgetary process.
The fiscal killer of killers in Bush's administration was never mentioned: the prescription-drug law that Bush signed in 2003. The vote was close in Congress. If he had vetoed it, it would never have passed. Instead, he turned the signing into a pageant. He brought in thousands of seniors to witness it. He announced: "You are here to witness the greatest advance in health care coverage for America's seniors since the founding of Medicare."
This sell-out to Teddy Kennedy (who refused to attend), added at least $8.7 trillion to the unfunded liability of Medicare. Yet it is never mentioned in the documentary. Instead, the documentary focuses on Obamacare, whose burden is mainly on the private sector and actually relieves some of the Medicare payments. In any case, that law was really Pelosicare. She was the ramrod. The documentary has one brief segment on her. It skips the point: bad as that law is, she was far more responsible for it than he was.
The Economy
A related thing that bothers me intensely is the fact that the documentary tries to pin the bad economy on Obama. The bad economy should be pinned on Alan Greenspan, with considerable help from his successor.
To suggest that the president of the United States has the power to make the economy worse to imply that he also has the power to make the economy terrible. He has limited power either way, unless he drags us into a war. Bush dragged us into two wars.
Ron Paul always was right for 36 years in not pointing to the president as the main economic problem, but rather the Federal Reserve System. So, any documentary that does not go after the Federal Reserve when it talks about economic problems but blames the president instead, and also ignores Congress, is doing the general public an enormous disservice. It keeps the Federal Reserve in the background in the thinking of the viewers, when the Federal Reserve ought to be in the foreground, with the presidency in the background. This is basic economics. D'Souza does not know what he is talking about with respect to economics.
Is this the Y2K guru Gary North?
>> The editors at the Von Mises Institute should have skimmed this dross off the top and published something else. <<
Not a chance they would do so, because the folks down at that “Institute” are all just about equally loony and just about equally anti-Israel as is Mr. North in the realm of military affairs and foreign policy.
(And they really ought to call it the “Murray Rothbard Institute” — because Rothbard appears to have influenced their thinking more than has von Mises.)
>> Gary North shows what happens to a brain on drugs <<
Or maybe what happens when you spend to much time with a guy named “Rockwell.”
>> Is this the Y2K guru Gary North? <<
One and the same, although in retrospect I think the terms “would-be guru” or “wannbe guru” or “failed guru” are better descriptors.
A President has no constitutional role in the adoption of an amendment.
Neither of our former Presidents appeared at the convention.
When I said colonize I meant for the long term and I mean generations.
The Russians were there for a decade the Brits for a couple decades. If we want to eliminate the threat of Islam for good we are going to have to invest the time it takes to civilize Islam or destroy Islam entirely.
I said that in the post.
Indeed. Old Lew belongs out there with L. Ron.
They’ve been running amok since 622 AD. I think that 1390 years might have established a solid trend line, no?
Orkinize ‘em
It’s just a hunch but I’m thinking Romney doesn’t want his future associated with Bush’s past..
Social Security and Medicare are also in the black, once upon a time.
Medicare Part D was to buy the votes of seniors, plain and simple. In this, Bush II was no better than all the other socialist democrats that feed at the troughs in the District of Corruption.
Good points BUT....it goes to show Bush II was a weak leader.
As much as we hated to see what and how Obama shoved universal healthcare down our throats, the fact is he lied, cheated and bullied his way to his goal.
Bush never sought to offend voters. He was content to target previous adversaries like Saddam, Dan Rather and others. This is petty compared to what we worked so hard to provide him in a 2nd term.
The 2nd term was to be all about entitlement and tax reforms. Bush put all these reforms in the hands of party elites and then sat back and let them operate at will. In other words Bush II put everything on ‘auto-pilot’ while he himself ‘waited’ for the reports.
What he needed to do was to steer those commissions in the direction that we conservatives wanted because it was us that reelected him and gave him a GOP Congress. But he acted like a RINO and cursed the Swift Boat Vets while nominating Harriet Myers to be a Supreme Court Justice.
Bush II, a pitiful leader who only rose to the Presidency because of name recognition, and because Americans were tired of the petty criminal class comprising the Clintons and a deranged Gore-Caligula.
Since Reagan we have been battered, bruised and abused by an elite class of self-appointed aristocrats. We’ve come now to the aristocracy versus the peasantry, the ruling class versus the country class.
More or less. The pet Banksof Jackson also issued their own.
I have never understood why he acted the way he did during Katrina. All anyone had to do was to look at the track of the hurricane after it turned north that a monster storm was about to hit New Orleans and that something extraordinary had to be done. He should have stayed at Barksdale since he must have know the limited capabilities of the mayor and the governor. Did he cut them slack because they were Democrats?
Right, Obama has no responsibility for the economy because....... well just because. But that Bush guy, he fuc7ed everything up. The executive must have had more constitutional power in 2008 than it did in 2009. What a pantload.
Thanks. I think I’ll pass. May as well listen to Harold Camping.
research assistant for libertarian Republican Congressman Ron Paul
I heard the Governor would not allow the army into her state unless she had control of them, that this standoff took hours to fix.
Blanco got her marching orders from the DNC to mess Bush up. Meanwhile, Nagin high-tailed it to Dallas to ride out the storm.
The ultimate example of the Rats never letting a crisis go to waste.
Even if Bush wanted to do something, he would have violated the Constitution.
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