A War by Any Other Name is Still War

I just watched in tears the space shuttle Discovery over our house, flying to its resting place at the Udvar-Hazy Space Museum at Dulles. Part of the American exceptionalism that made U.S. into a superpower ended with the demolishing of the NASA space shuttle program. Many closures have taken place under this administration that will affect and diminish our ability to defend national security for many years to come. Will we ever recover?

The Romans used to say, “Si vis pacem, para bellum,” “if you want peace, prepare for war.” Do we really need a large army, nuclear warheads, war ships, weapons, drones, tanks, and the latest technology to fight against foreign and domestic enemies? If you ask a group of people, you get many different answers.

According to Kevin D. Freeman, “Events of the past dozen years clearly show that America’s adversaries have gained ground in non-military ways.  Could the 9/11 terror attacks, high gas prices, market volatility and the U.S. credit rating downgrade all be linked to the same strategy?”

The recently published 150-page United Nation’s “World Happiness Report” is attempting to indoctrinate us into Fabian Socialism as an absolute giver of wellness, which must be imposed on the entire population of the globe. Happiness no longer comes from within, it comes from socialism.

Indoctrination worked well with our children in the last fifty years. We are witnessing the result of dumbing down of American education and the blatant move toward open socialist and communist indoctrination in schools and universities. If you tell a lie often enough to children and ignorant adults, they will eventually believe it to be the truth.

A book by two Chinese colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Wiangsui, “Unrestricted Warfare,” published by the People’s Liberation Army, listed several variables of “war by other means:” (The American Legion Magazine, Kevin D. Freeman, April 2012)

-         Financial warfare (manipulation of currencies, banks, and the stock market)

-         Technological warfare (having primary control of technology such as the intact drone we gifted to the Iranians so they can reverse engineer it or sell it to the Chinese to do so)

-         Resources warfare (manipulating oil reserves, the price of oil, oil supply, oil refining capacity, moratorium and access to key resources)

-         Network warfare (Internet control, Facebook control, Google control by various governments and entities)

-         Economic aid warfare (creating economic dependencies in a segment of the population such as welfare, earned income tax credit, EBT, spreading the wealth through schemes, or dependency of an entire nation, thus controlling them)

Running out of money and overprinting your nation’s currency to the point that it becomes worthless is an important reason for a nation’s decline. Since April 2010 until April 2012, our money supply M1 rose from $17 trillion to $22 trillion, according to government reports. The Fed has printed $5 trillion worth of currency without any backing by goods and services, at a time when the average GDP growth has been 2.4 percent. This devalues our dollar, increases our national debt, and increases overall prices, including the price of oil, in addition to the cost born by our disastrous energy policies.

Oil-price manipulation by speculators on the futures market in 2007 when oil was $50 per barrel to $150 per barrel in 2008 occurred without a disruption in supply. Supply actually increased slightly.

“Daily paper trades at the New York Mercantile Exchange were seven times higher than the actual oil used.” If you accounted for all other exchanges, Chicago, London, Dubai, other markets, trades of oil speculators may have been 50 to 100 times that of oil used.  Producers and consumers had no change in production levels or consumption patterns. (Kevin D. Freeman)

China has the United States over a barrel with its huge foreign exchange reserves, $2.8 trillion. We lost our AAA credit rating in late 2011. We are vulnerable to naked short selling and naked credit default swaps. European Union wisely banned their use.

Henry Paulson, Treasury Secretary under President Bush, received warnings from China that Russia would dump holdings of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, forcing a bailout that would strain the U.S. economy. It happened. (Kevin D. Freeman)

One of the weapons frequently used to fight an enemy is to counter fit its currency and drop it by planeloads onto that country in order to destabilize their economy by creating hyperinflation - too much money chasing too few goods.

Bruce Thornton believes our nation is in decline because “citizens choose to spend money on themselves, not on defense.” Lavish early retirements, excessive vacations, early retirement at 50 in hundreds of professions, two additional paychecks at the end of the year, and other socialized welfare benefits have contributed greatly to the economic woes of Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Ireland.

Austerity measures alone (spending less money on social programs and taxing citizens more who already cheat heavily on their taxes) will not work unless there is reasonable economic growth.  When general unemployment is almost 24 percent in Spain and 50 percent among the young, it is hard to fuel economic growth.

Gross Domestic Product is the monetary sum of all final goods and services produced yearly in a nation. Italy’s public debt is $2.3 trillion, which is 20 percent larger than its GDP.  Interest alone is five percent of GDP.

Italy, like many EU nations, has a worker shortage that interferes with their ability to grow the economy. Italy’s low fertility rate of 1.4 is partially to blame. The number needed to replenish the population is 2.1. Immigrants supplant the labor force but mostly in the non-skill category. Many become recipients of generous welfare payments as soon as they are admitted into the union. “Heavy debt and a shrinking population are a very bad combination.” (The Atlantic)

Any “baby boom” eventually reaches retirement age, the labor force shrinks, and older workers receive Social Security, their pensions and benefits, spend their savings, thus “depleting the nation’s supply of capital.” (The Atlantic)

Megan McArdle made an excellent point that having such generous pensions and benefits in Europe, a security net in old age, caused people to stop having babies that otherwise might have been necessary to care for aging parents in the absence of retirement income. She concluded, “Europe’s pension system may have set in motion the very demographic decline that helped make that system – and some European governments – insolvent.” (The Atlantic)

EU countries have a declining GDP, however per capita retirement and welfare disbursements are higher than ever. Europeans have considered themselves superior to Americans because of their outstanding socialized well-being and happiness. The hapless Americans were unhappily working to pay for and provide military protection to the world, subsidies for drugs, grants for economic development and financial aid, and other forms of disaster relief.

Spain has about 1.5 million homes unfinished or unsold. These homes were built in the time “cuando pensabamos que eramos ricos,” “when we thought we were rich,” the time when easy EU money was pouring in. When citizens default in Spain, banks sell their property at auction, but the owners are still responsible for the remainder of the debt, they cannot walk away from their mortgaged property as we do in the U.S. Spanish private debt is 220 percent of GDP because bankruptcy laws are quite different. (John Mauldin)

Spain cannot attract new investors to service its debt unless Madrid pays 3.6 percent more to issue a bond than Berlin would. European Investment Bank (EIB) is discussing the possibility of another Marshall Plan for Europe. (Fiscal Times, Patrick Smith)

Banks in Portugal are experiencing runs-on-banks because people are moving their money to safer countries such as Germany. European banks are not insured by FDIC (depositors’ insurance in the U.S.). EU deposits are guaranteed by the national central banks and the respective government, not by the European Central Bank. If a government is in financial trouble, then depositors’ money is not safe. (David Kotok)

Greece has been bailed out twice and has become the financial black sheep of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), of the European Central Bank (ECB), and indirectly, of our Fed who has been pouring money into the IMF.

According to Rodney Atkinson, as a pre-condition to receiving the second 130 billion Euro bailout, Greece had to pay out, not roll over, 1.4 billion Euros worth of bonds. The money was allegedly taken in March 2012 from various Greek utilities, including hospitals and universities, without prior notification, causing checks deposited with the Bank of Greece to bounce, and unpleasant repercussions for those institutions.

Mark Steyn believes that collapse of our ethnic identity, exacerbated by liberal brainwashing, economic meltdown caused by excessive government spending, and large debt will cause our decline. (“After America: Get Ready for Armageddon”)

Cutbacks in our defense budget due to sequestration are the biggest threat to our national security, $1 trillion over the next ten years.

If our military becomes weaker, if our faith is derided and ignored, and if our education is watered down by political correctness/cultural Marxism, we become weaker culturally and as a nation, and the end is not far in sight. As Winston Churchill said, “If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.” 

There is ample evidence that the majority of Americans allows liberals, a minority, to malign our ideals, our institutions, our faith, our cherished symbols, as they admire and praise Europeans for their civilization and superiority, and apologize for our American exceptionalism.

Our national unity is in danger if we choose to believe the lies that we are racist, imperialist, colonialist, sexist, and genocidal. It is not true what the MSM and universities tell students, that Europe is a model of a just, more civilized society. It is a dying empire, demographically, socially, and economically, whose failed socialist and communist policies should not be emulated unless we desire their fate.

We are at war, not a conventional one. We are attacked from all sides simultaneously. We are attacked from within for our conservatism and faith. We are attacked by race baiters, liberals, environmentalists, and foreign enemies. We are attacked financially by speculators, foreign and domestic, EPA through job and wealth killing regulations, TSA through invasion of privacy and molestations under the guise of “safety,” and by United Nations through UN Agenda 21.

Hollywood is destroying our values and culture. Illegal aliens are pouring in from north and south, stealing our wealth and ability to defend our borders. Our government is robbing our children and grandchildren’s futures through non-stop borrowing of money from China and uncontrollable spending.

We are at war with the blatant communists and socialists among us, some of whom serve in public office. We are at war with those who want to restrict free speech, termed as hate speech by those with whom we disagree. We are at war with the left who uses successful tactics to highjack law and order through a massive intrusion into our American freedom and way of life. A war by any other name is still a war.