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Tag: Democratic Party

Obama and the Triumph of the Fabians

by admin on Mar.12, 2009, under Uncategorized

By Michael Filozof
March 08, 2009

In 1945, the United Kingdom implemented a program of change at the hands of a new left wing government. The structure of support built up in previous decades, the way change was sold to the public, outcomes themselves have much to teach us about America’s future.

To most Americans, the iconic image of British strength, resolve, and power is that of the cigar-chomping, bulldog-faced Winston Churchill defiantly growling “we shall never surrender” and “this is our finest hour” as Nazi bombs rained down on London every night during the summer of 1940.

Churchill almost single-handedly saved Britain from defeat at the hands of the Nazis, stepping up to become Prime Minister after Neville Chamberlain resigned in disgrace after diplomatic attempts to achieve “peace in our time” with Hitler proved folly.

But relatively few Americans may be aware that, despite his historic victory over one of the most evil regimes in history, Churchill was unceremoniously booted by British voters when his Conservative Party was defeated within weeks of Germany’s surrender.

What followed marked the beginning of the end for the greatest empire since Rome.

The election of 1945 was a decisive victory for Britain’s Labour Party. Labour gained 394 seats in the 640-seat House of Commons, named Clement Attlee as Prime Minister, and implemented historic changes in Britain, turning a once-great empire into a second-rate socialist welfare state in a span of 20 years.

The Labour government nationalized key industries in Britain, including rail, mining, air transport, utilities, and communications. Labour also created a “cradle-to-grave” welfare state and nationalized medicine with the creation of the National Health Service. Oppressive taxation was enacted to pay for the massive increase in government spending; by the 1970s income and estate taxes on the wealthy had skyrocketed to 80%.

In foreign policy, the Labour government engaged in wholesale decolonization, and the world is much worse off as a result. In 1947 British India was decolonized and partitioned into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. The resulting chaos displaced 12 million refugees and caused a million deaths. Sixty years and several wars later the former colonies are nuclear-armed powers, still locked in chronic tension over control of the mountain region of Kashmir.

Burma, Ceylon, and the Palestinian Mandate were also decolonized in the immediate postwar period. Burma — now Myanmar — is home to one of the most repressive military dictatorships in the world. Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, is experiencing a decades-long guerrilla war, and the 60-year Arab-Israeli conflict in the former Palestinian Mandate knows no end. In subsequent decades, Britain also withdrew from East Africa, leaving in its wake the oppressive 30-year dictatorship of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and a tribally-divided Kenya, recently wracked by election violence. Sudan, another former East African possession of the British Empire, is home to the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

By the 1960s, the Labour Party had overturned nearly all of the traditional aspects of a British culture that had been historically staid, stoic, and reserved. Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s government decriminalized abortion and homosexuality, abolished capital punishment, and revised immigration laws to allow large numbers of Third World emigrants to Britain for the first time. Consequently, today’s Britain is a land of social dysfunction, including high rates of drunkenness, property crime, welfare dependency, racial strife, promiscuity and irreligiosity. The illegitimate birth rate in the U.K. hit 50% in 2008, while a mere 10% of the population regularly attends church. Such behavior would have been unimaginable in prim Victorian society a century ago.

Although Britain’s Conservatives managed to form governments in the postwar period, they were unable to fully reverse the changes implemented by Labour. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did manage to lower tax rates and privatize some industries in the 1980s, but Conservatives never abolished the welfare state, the NHS, or reversed the social decline that had taken place in the postwar period.

The Britain that strode across the world as an economic and military colossus during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - bringing technology, learning, literature, order, and an unprecedented creation of wealth — was gone forever by the 1960s, its culture replaced by a trite and ephemeral trendiness epitomized by Beatlemania, punk rock, and “Cool Britannia.”

The Ideological Clique Behind the Change

These changes did not take place by accident. They were planned by British cultural elites, particularly by members of the Fabian Society, who had worked for over a half-century to promote the policies finally implemented by Labour governments after 1945.

The Fabians advocated a gradual, democratic socialist takeover rather than violent revolution. Fabians sought control over more banal aspects of life — transport, utilities, medicine — that were far less threatening to the general public than the prospect of armed revolution.

The society was named after the Roman general Fabius Maximus, whose tactic was to wait for the ideal opportunity. The society’s motto — “For the right moment you must wait… but when the right moment comes you must strike hard” — is eerily similar to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s sentiment that “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” because “crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that [we] could not do before.”

Fabian Society membership was a Who’s Who of prewar British intellectuals, writers and artists who had rejected classical free-market economics, traditional religion, nationalism and imperialism. They included nerdy academic socialists like Harold Laski and G.D.H. Cole, as well as a motley collection of misfits, pacifists, deviants and utopian radicals.

The writer H.G. Wells, advocate of eugenics and a utopian global state, was a Fabian. Noted for his infidelity, he had an affair with the American eugenicist and founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger. Playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw, an advocate of feminism, socialism, and vegetarianism, was a Fabian; he opposed British involvement in World War I but became an admirer of the USSR in the 1930s. “Sexologist” Havelock Ellis, who married a lesbian and was said to only become aroused when watching women urinate, was a member, as was Edward Carpenter, a vegan gay-rights activist and nudist. Economist John Maynard Keynes, whose theories influenced the policies of nearly all Western governments since the 1930s and are in vogue in the Obama administration today, was briefly a member.

The Fabian Society was disproportionately influential in the Labour government of 1945; though the Society numbered only several thousand, more than half of the Labour Party MPs were members. Nearly all leaders of the postwar Labour Party have been members, including Attlee, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair.

Just as the Fabians influenced the Labour Party agenda, today’s Democratic Party reflects the disproportionate influence of a clique of elite cultural and academic leftists now seeking to implement a socialist agenda they have been promoting since the 1960s. This agenda includes nationalized health care, taxpayer-funded abortion, federal control of education, gay marriage, openly-practicing homosexuals in the military, and much, much higher taxes.

Like the Fabian-influenced Labour government, the Obama administration has embarked on a course to “remake” America. The administration will effectively nationalize transportation and utilities through its “green energy” initiatives (indeed, Congresswoman Maxine Waters recently advocated nationalizing the oil industry) openly seeks to nationalize health care (the $787 billion “stimulus” bill includes billions of dollars to begin centralizing health care records) and is using the mortgage and banking crisis to effectively nationalize the financial services and banking sector.

In foreign policy, the Obama administration has announced a deadline to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq, and indicated a willingness to cease implementation of a missile-defense shield in Europe. Obama, who campaigned as a “citizen of the world” and effectively apologized to Middle Eastern audiences for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in his first televised interview as president, seeks to curtail American military hegemony and replace it with reliance upon global institutions such as the U.N.

On immigration, Obama and the Democratic Party support citizenship for 12 million mostly Spanish-speaking illegal aliens currently residing in the U.S.; such a plan would invariably allow those new citizens to sponsor even more non-English speaking family members to emigrate to the U.S.

The agenda of the American Left bears an uncomfortable similarity to that of the Fabian Society intellectuals that reshaped British society. If this agenda is successfully implemented by Barack Obama, the election of 2008 in the United States will be a watershed event, much like the British election of 1945.

But this analogy is not an optimistic one. If one wants to know what the United States will look like fifty years after Obama, one need only look at the fall of Britain from its imperial height in 1945 to the Britain of today — a second-rate, secularized “nanny state” whose disarmed citizens are monitored by thousands of police cameras and whose police actively prosecute “hate crimes” and offenses against “multiculturalism.”

Like Britain, the United States will almost certainly remain an important financial center and regional power several decades from now, but the center of global gravity will long since have shifted to the Chinese as the United States abandons it global dominance and becomes preoccupied with a liberal, postmodern, domestic agenda. It does not have to be this way — the United States can still assert itself as global hegemon if it has the will to do so - but the successful implementation of the Obama agenda will assure that it does not.

If Obama achieves the goals articulated in his campaign, his presidency will surely mark the end of “the American Century” just as the election of 1945 signaled the end of Victorian and Edwardian British global dominance.

Obama and the Triumph of the Fabians

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A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Fabian Society, Communitarianism and the New World Order

by admin on Mar.11, 2009, under Uncategorized

By Matthew D. Jarvie
October 31, 2008
SovereignSentience.blogspot.com

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

The Fabian Society, Communitarianism and the New World Order

This video is a very brief, six-minute introduction to the British Fabian Society, which was established on orders from the Crown in 1884, with the purpose of creating a movement to usher in by stealth a one world government.

The ideology promoted by Fabians and Fabian thinkers is called communitarianism, which is also sometimes referred to (by people like Tony Blair) as the ‘Third Way’. The Third Way refers to the synthesis of capitalism and socialism in the dialectic scheme.

This dialectical synthesis, or outcome, is to be a collectivist form of government where all individualism is forcibly relinquished in the name of “unity” and complete and unwavering allegiance to the state under a scientific, socialistic dictatorship run by “experts.”

This is to be a system run on complete and total efficiency, where the only purpose of the individual is to serve the state. The so-called “useless eaters,” as people like Kissinger refer to, are seen as only a burden to this efficiency, and therefore will be incarcerated or killed if this system is allowed to be fully implemented. This is precisely why the “Elite” want an 80-90% reduction of the world’s population, with just enough peasants to serve their utopia, described in writings by people such as Huxley and Fabian H.G. Wells, and promoted still today in well-funded works of propaganda such as Zeitgeist, which are designed to promote the New World Order religion.

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Fabian Society, Communitarianism and the New World Order

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Denver Airport (New World Airport) Murals

by admin on Mar.11, 2009, under Uncategorized

A Documentary about the many odd happenings in and around Denver Airport, Colorado.

Explains the meanings of the murals, symbology around the airport and what’s going on underneath the airport, as well as around it.

Part 1

Part 2

Denver New World Airport Artwork

Stimulus to be signed in DENVER… NOT DC! Why?

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Wikipedia scrubs Obama eligibility Mention of citizenship issues deleted in minutes, ‘offending’ users banned

by admin on Mar.09, 2009, under Uncategorized

By Aaron Klein
2009 WorldNetDaily

From Wikipedia’s Barack Obama page

Wikipedia, the online “free encyclopedia” mega-site written and edited entirely by its users, has been deleting within minutes any mention of eligibility issues surrounding Barack Obama’s presidency, with administrators kicking off anyone who writes about the subject, WND has learned.

A perusal through Obama’s current Wikipedia entry finds a heavily guarded, mostly glowing biography about the U.S. president. Some of Obama’s most controversial past affiliations, including with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and former Weathermen terrorist Bill Ayers, are not once mentioned, even though those associations received much news media attention and served as dominant themes during the presidential elections last year.

Also completely lacking is any mention of the well-publicized concerns surrounding Obama’s eligibility to serve as commander-in-chief.

Where’s the proof Barack Obama was born in the U.S. or that he fulfills the “natural-born American” clause in the Constitution? If you still want to see it, join more than 300,000 others and sign up now!

Indeed, multiple times, Wikipedia users who wrote about the eligibility issues had their entries deleted almost immediately and were banned from re-posting any material on the website for three days.

In one example, Wikipedia user “Jerusalem21″ added the following to Obama’s page:

“There have been some doubts about whether Obama was born in the U.S. after the politician refused to release to the public a carbon copy of his birth certificate and amid claims from his relatives he may have been born in Kenya. Numerous lawsuits have been filed petitioning Obama to release his birth certificate, but most suits have been thrown out by the courts.”

As is required on the online encyclopedia, that entry was backed up by third-party media articles, citing the Chicago Tribune and WorldNetDaily.com

The entry was posted on Feb. 24, at 6:16 p.m. EST. Just three minutes later, the entry was removed by a Wikipedia administrator, claiming the posting violated the websites rules against “fringe” material.

(Story continues below)

According to Wikipedia rules, however, a “fringe theory can be considered notable if it has been referenced extensively, and in a serious manner, in at least one major publication, or by a notable group or individual that is independent of the theory.”

The Obama eligibility issue has indeed been reported extensively by multiple news media outlets. WorldNetDaily has led the coverage. Other news outlets, such as Britain’s Daily Mail and the Chicago Tribune have released articles critical of claims Obama may not be eligible. The Los Angeles Times quoted statements by former presidential candidate Alan Keys doubting Obama is eligible to serve as president. Just last week, the Internet giant America Online featured a top news article about the eligibility subject, referencing WND’s coverage.

When the user “Jerusalem21″ tried to repost the entry about Obama’s eligibility a second time, another administrator removed the material within two minutes and then banned the Wikipedia user from posting anything on the website for three days.

Wikipedia administrators have the ability to kick off users if the administrator believes the user violated the website’s rules.

Over the last month, WND has monitored several other attempts to add eligibility issues to Obama’s Wikipedia page. In every attempt monitored, the information was deleted within minutes and the user who posted the material was barred from the website for three days.

Angela Beesley Starling, a spokeswoman for Wikipedia, explained to WND that all the website’s encyclopedia content is monitored by users. She said the administrators who deleted the entries are volunteers.

“Administrators,” Starling said, “are simply people who are trusted by the other community members to have access to some extra tools that allow them to delete pages and perform other tasks that help the encyclopedia.”

According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia is the seventh most trafficked website on the Internet. A Google search for the words “Barack Obama” brings up the president’s Wikipedia page in the top four choices, following two links to Obama’s official websites.

Ayers, Wright also missing in Obama’s bio

The entire Wikipedia entry on Obama seems to be heavily promotional toward the U.S. president. It contains nearly no criticism or controversy, including appropriate mention of important issues where relevant.

For example, the current paragraph on Obama’s religion contains no mention of Wright, even though Obama’s association with the controversial pastor was one of the most talked about issues during the presidential campaign.

That paragraph states: “Obama explained how, through working with black churches as a community organizer while in his twenties, he came to understand ‘the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change.’ He was baptized at the Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988 and was an active member there for two decades.”

Ayers is also not mentioned, even where relevant.

WND monitored as a Wikipedia user attempted to add Ayers’ name to an appropriate paragraph. One of those additions, backed up with news articles, read as follows:

“He served alongside former Weathermen leader William Ayers from 1994 to 2002 on the board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which in 1985 had been the first foundation to fund the Developing Communities Project, and also from 1994 to 2002 on the board of directors of the Joyce Foundation. Obama served on the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 2002, as founding president and chairman of the board of directors from 1995 to 1991. Ayers was the founder and director of the Challenge.”

Within two minutes that Wikipedia entry was deleted and the user banned from posting on the website for three days, purportedly for adding “Point of View junk edits,” even though the addition was well-established fact.

The Wikipedia entry about former President George W. Bush, by contrast, is highly critical. One typical entry reads, “Prior to his marriage, Bush had multiple accounts of alcohol abuse. … After his re-election, Bush received increasingly heated criticism. In 2005, the Bush administration dealt with widespread criticism over its handling of Hurricane Katrina. In December 2007, the United States entered the second-longest post-World War II recession.”

The entry on Bush also cites claims that he was “favorably treated due to his father’s political standing” during his National Guard service.” It says Bush served on the board of directors for Harken and that questions of possible insider trading involving Harken arose even though a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation concluded the information Bush had at the time of his stock sale was not sufficient to constitute insider trading.

Wikipedia scrubs Obama eligibility

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The Obama Economy

by admin on Mar.03, 2009, under Uncategorized

As the Dow keeps dropping, the President is running out of people to blame.

As 2009 opened, three weeks before Barack Obama took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 9034 on January 2, its highest level since the autumn panic. Yesterday the Dow fell another 4.24% to 6763, for an overall decline of 25% in two months and to its lowest level since 1997. The dismaying message here is that President Obama’s policies have become part of the economy’s problem.

Americans have welcomed the Obama era in the same spirit of hope the President campaigned on. But after five weeks in office, it’s become clear that Mr. Obama’s policies are slowing, if not stopping, what would otherwise be the normal process of economic recovery. From punishing business to squandering scarce national public resources, Team Obama is creating more uncertainty and less confidence — and thus a longer period of recession or subpar growth.

[Review & Outlook]

The Democrats who now run Washington don’t want to hear this, because they benefit from blaming all bad economic news on President Bush. And Mr. Obama has inherited an unusual recession deepened by credit problems, both of which will take time to climb out of. But it’s also true that the economy has fallen far enough, and long enough, that much of the excess that led to recession is being worked off. Already 15 months old, the current recession will soon match the average length — and average job loss — of the last three postwar downturns. What goes down will come up — unless destructive policies interfere with the sources of potential recovery.

And those sources have been forming for some time. The price of oil and other commodities have fallen by two-thirds since their 2008 summer peak, which has the effect of a major tax cut. The world is awash in liquidity, thanks to monetary ease by the Federal Reserve and other central banks. Monetary policy operates with a lag, but last year’s easing will eventually stir economic activity.

Housing prices have fallen 27% from their Case-Shiller peak, or some two-thirds of the way back to their historical trend. While still high, credit spreads are far from their peaks during the panic, and corporate borrowers are again able to tap the credit markets. As equities were signaling with their late 2008 rally and January top, growth should under normal circumstances begin to appear in the second half of this year.

So what has happened in the last two months? The economy has received no great new outside shock. Exchange rates and other prices have been stable, and there are no security crises of note. The reality of a sharp recession has been known and built into stock prices since last year’s fourth quarter.

What is new is the unveiling of Mr. Obama’s agenda and his approach to governance. Every new President has a finite stock of capital — financial and political — to deploy, and amid recession Mr. Obama has more than most. But one negative revelation has been the way he has chosen to spend his scarce resources on income transfers rather than growth promotion. Most of his “stimulus” spending was devoted to social programs, rather than public works, and nearly all of the tax cuts were devoted to income maintenance rather than to improving incentives to work or invest.

His Treasury has been making a similar mistake with its financial bailout plans. The banking system needs to work through its losses, and one necessary use of public capital is to assist in burning down those bad assets as fast as possible. Yet most of Team Obama’s ministrations so far have gone toward triage and life support, rather than repair and recovery.

AIG yesterday received its fourth “rescue,” including $70 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program cash, without any clear business direction. (See here.) Citigroup’s restructuring last week added not a dollar of new capital, and also no clear direction. Perhaps the imminent Treasury “stress tests” will clear the decks, but until they do the banks are all living in fear of becoming the next AIG. All of this squanders public money that could better go toward burning down bank debt.

The market has notably plunged since Mr. Obama introduced his budget last week, and that should be no surprise. The document was a declaration of hostility toward capitalists across the economy. Health-care stocks have dived on fears of new government mandates and price controls. Private lenders to students have been told they’re no longer wanted. Anyone who uses carbon energy has been warned to expect a huge tax increase from cap and trade. And every risk-taker and investor now knows that another tax increase will slam the economy in 2011, unless Mr. Obama lets Speaker Nancy Pelosi impose one even earlier.

Meanwhile, Congress demands more bank lending even as it assails lenders and threatens to let judges rewrite mortgage contracts. The powers in Congress — unrebuked by Mr. Obama — are ridiculing and punishing the very capitalists who are essential to a sustainable recovery. The result has been a capital strike, and the return of the fear from last year that we could face a far deeper downturn. This is no way to nurture a wounded economy back to health.

Listening to Mr. Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, on the weekend, we couldn’t help but wonder if they appreciate any of this. They seem preoccupied with going to the barricades against Republicans who wield little power, or picking a fight with Rush Limbaugh, as if this is the kind of economic leadership Americans want.

Perhaps they’re reading the polls and figure they have two or three years before voters stop blaming Republicans and Mr. Bush for the economy. Even if that’s right in the long run, in the meantime their assault on business and investors is delaying a recovery and ensuring that the expansion will be weaker than it should be when it finally does arrive.

The Obama Economy

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The new boss is starting to look a lot like the old one

by admin on Mar.02, 2009, under Uncategorized

Some Alex Jones clips are contained…I’m not a fan of AJ. Nothing against him as person…I just don’t agree with everything he states. My thoughts…its not about inducing fear…its about opening doors to information. Seek your freedom…

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

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We Are All Socialists Now- As Published in NEWSWEEK

by admin on Mar.02, 2009, under Uncategorized

Written by Gary Benoit
NewsweekNewsweek magazine published the following headline on the cover of its February 16 issue: “We Are All Socialists Now: The Perils and Promise of the New Era of Big Government.” Of course, it’s hard to imagine that we have only now entered the era of “big government” — weren’t we there already? But there is no doubt that both money creation by the Fed and spending by the federal government are accelerating to finance the proliferating bailout and stimulus programs.

Newsweek claims: “In the absence of a robust private sector, the government will fill in the gap.” In reality, the private sector has not been robust because the government has been anything but absent. As The New American has repeatedly pointed out, the economic downturn is a result of too much government spending, too many government regulations, too much government borrowing, and too much new money being pumped into the economy by the Fed. Yet these are the very same steps that the powers that be are undertaking to reinvigorate the economy  — only at an accelerated rate compared to the past.

But Newsweek’s choice for a cover headline — “We Are All Socialists Now” — in one respect points to a bit of good news. After all, the dominant thinking in Washington has been socialist for a long time, but the policies have not been identified as “socialist.” This is particularly the case when Republicans are in the White House yet are able to push through socialist policies — e.g., last year’s $700 billion financial bailout when George W. Bush was president — yet still retain the “conservative” label. Yet more and more the “S” word is being used to identify the socialist policies for what they truly are, and that growing recognition should cause many more people to sit up and take notice.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/economics-mainmenu-44/773

We Are All Socialists Now

In many ways our economy already resembles a European one. As boomers age and spending grows, we will become even more French.

Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Feb 16, 2009

The interview was nearly over. on the Fox News Channel last Wednesday evening, Sean Hannity was coming to the end of a segment with Indiana Congressman Mike Pence, the chair of the House Republican Conference and a vociferous foe of President Obama’s nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill. How, Pence had asked rhetorically, was $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts going to put people back to work in Indiana? How would $20 million for “fish passage barriers” (a provision to pay for the removal of barriers in rivers and streams so that fish could migrate freely) help create jobs? Hannity could not have agreed more. “It is … the European Socialist Act of 2009,” the host said, signing off. “We’re counting on you to stop it. Thank you, congressman.”

There it was, just before the commercial: the S word, a favorite among conservatives since John McCain began using it during the presidential campaign. (Remember Joe the Plumber? Sadly, so do we.) But it seems strangely beside the point. The U.S. government has already—under a conservative Republican administration—effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries. That seems a stronger sign of socialism than $50 million for art. Whether we want to admit it or not—and many, especially Congressman Pence and Hannity, do not—the America of 2009 is moving toward a modern European state.

We remain a center-right nation in many ways—particularly culturally, and our instinct, once the crisis passes, will be to try to revert to a more free-market style of capitalism—but it was, again, under a conservative GOP administration that we enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years: prescription drugs for the elderly. People on the right and the left want government to invest in alternative energies in order to break our addiction to foreign oil. And it is unlikely that even the reddest of states will decline federal money for infrastructural improvements.

If we fail to acknowledge the reality of the growing role of government in the economy, insisting instead on fighting 21st-century wars with 20th-century terms and tactics, then we are doomed to a fractious and unedifying debate. The sooner we understand where we truly stand, the sooner we can think more clearly about how to use government in today’s world.

As the Obama administration presses the largest fiscal bill in American history, caps the salaries of executives at institutions receiving federal aid at $500,000 and introduces a new plan to rescue the banking industry, the unemployment rate is at its highest in 16 years. The Dow has slumped to 1998 levels, and last year mortgage foreclosures rose 81 percent.

All of this is unfolding in an economy that can no longer be understood, even in passing, as the Great Society vs. the Gipper. Whether we like it or not—or even whether many people have thought much about it or not—the numbers clearly suggest that we are headed in a more European direction. A decade ago U.S. government spending was 34.3 percent of GDP, compared with 48.2 percent in the euro zone—a roughly 14-point gap, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 2010 U.S. spending is expected to be 39.9 percent of GDP, compared with 47.1 percent in the euro zone—a gap of less than 8 points. As entitlement spending rises over the next decade, we will become even more French.

This is not to say that berets will be all the rage this spring, or that Obama has promised a croissant in every toaster oven. But the simple fact of the matter is that the political conversation, which shifts from time to time, has shifted anew, and for the foreseeable future Americans will be more engaged with questions about how to manage a mixed economy than about whether we should have one.

The architect of this new era of big government? History has a sense of humor, for the man who laid the foundations for the world Obama now rules is George W. Bush, who moved to bail out the financial sector last autumn with $700 billion.

Bush brought the Age of Reagan to a close; now Obama has gone further, reversing Bill Clinton’s end of big government. The story, as always, is complicated. Polls show that Americans don’t trust government and still don’t want big government. They do, however, want what government delivers, like health care and national defense and, now, protections from banking and housing failure. During the roughly three decades since Reagan made big government the enemy and “liberal” an epithet, government did not shrink. It grew. But the economy grew just as fast, so government as a percentage of GDP remained about the same. Much of that economic growth was real, but for the past five years or so, it has borne a suspicious resemblance to Bernie Madoff’s stock fund. Americans have been living high on borrowed money (the savings rate dropped from 7.6 percent in 1992 to less than zero in 2005) while financiers built castles in the air.

Now comes the reckoning. The answer may indeed be more government. In the short run, since neither consumers nor business is likely to do it, the government will have to stimulate the economy. And in the long run, an aging population and global warming and higher energy costs will demand more government taxing and spending. The catch is that more government intrusion in the economy will almost surely limit growth (as it has in Europe, where a big welfare state has caused chronic high unemployment). Growth has always been America’s birthright and saving grace.

The Obama administration is caught in a paradox. It must borrow and spend to fix a crisis created by too much borrowing and spending. Having pumped the economy up with a stimulus, the president will have to cut the growth of entitlement spending by holding down health care and retirement costs and still invest in ways that will produce long-term growth. Obama talks of the need for smart government. To get the balance between America and France right, the new president will need all the smarts he can summon.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/183663
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NEW PARTY MEMBERS AND BARRACK OBAMA: Running to Win The Key Races

by admin on Mar.02, 2009, under Uncategorized

New Party Icon October 1996 Update :
Running to Win : The Key Races
New Party members are busy knocking on doors, hammering down lawn signs, and phoning voters to support NP candidates this fall. Here are some of our key races:Arkansas: The Little Rock New Party has a full slate of candidates up for election in November. LRNP steering committee member Michael Booker is running unopposed for re-election to the Arkansas State House. Two NP members - Paul Kelly and Genevieve Stewart - are running for at-large (city-wide) city council positions. And in a head-to-head battle between the New Party and the conservative right, NP member Jayne Cia faces the Arkansas state chair of Empower America (Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett’s organization) for a Justice of the Peace (county board) position.

Illinois: Three NP-members won Democratic primaries last Spring and face off against Republican opponents on election day: Danny Davis (U.S. House), Barack Obama (State Senate) and Patricia Martin (Cook County Judiciary).

Maryland: Two New Party members are up for school board seats this fall: Doyle Niemann in Prince George’s County and Dan Parr in Montgomery County.

Minnesota: Despite the successful effort by conservative Democratic Party forces to deny Progressive Minnesota the opportunity to use fusion this fall, the state legislative candidates that sought our nomination still see themselves as Progressive Minnesota candidates, and we’re still backing them in the general election. PM/NP endorsed candidates include Ellen Anderson, Karen Clark, Andy Dawkins, Linda Higgins, and Sandy Pappas. Progressive Minnesota has also endorsed Green Party State Assembly candidate Cam Gordon.

New York: The New Party of Long Island is backing three candidates for office this Fall: State Assembly candidate Tom DiNapoli and Congressional candidates Carolyn McCarthy and Nora Bredes. NP members collected the necessary signatures to nominate progressive Democratic Assemblyman Tom DiNapoli on the New Party line, making this the first Democratic Party/New Party fusion effort. The chapter is supporting a major voter registration drive in African-American and Hispanic communities in McCarthy’s district.

Washington, DC: DC New Democracy/NP is backing ten candidates for Advisory Neighborhood Commissions (Almedith Bass-Williams, John Jordan, Laine McRaney, Henry Fernandez, Todd Mosley, Daniel Rosenberg, Gerry Lorentz, Will Hill, Dennis Dolinger, Violet Hewlett), neighborhood-based councils that represent community concerns to the mayor and city council. In addition, DCND is recruiting candidates to run write-in campaigns in some of the 80-odd ANC races with no candidate.

Wisconsin: In addition to the four Progressive Milwaukee-backed candidates running for state office (Spencer Coggs, Dale Dulberger, Gwendolynne Moore, Johnnie Morris-Tatum, see Sept Update), two New Party members in Fox Valley are running for the state assembly. Progressive Fox Valley founder and chair Tony Palmeri is in a surprisingly close race against an four-term incumbent conservative Republican in Oshkosh. New Party and AFSCME (American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees) member Corky Van Handel is also running for the state assembly in a nearby district. Both are running as Democrats.

Membership Growth

September was the New Party’s all-time high month for membership recruitment - more than 1000 new members joined! Welcome aboard.As always, onward and upward…

http://web.archive.org/web/20010306031216/www.newparty.org/up9610.html

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