The View From 1776

Liberal-progressives have been thwarted by the world’s growing awareness (1) that the threat of man-made global warming is a fraudulent scam, and (2) that the economic costs of action demanded by secular religious fanatics are staggeringly high and far beyond any reasonable cost-benefit ratio.  In a desperate attempt to impose the one-world-government vision of a small band of “scientists,” liberal-progressives are now turning to judicial activism.

Judicial activism is an innovation developed by the ACLU’s Roger Baldwin in the 1920s, originally for a somewhat different purpose.  Working through the Harvard Law School, Baldwin promoted a radically new interpretation of the Bill of Rights.  The intent was to manipulate the Constitution to make it destroy itself. 

A constitution is intended to reflect the most fundamental values of a society, to embody that society’s moral principles.  The ACLU’s game plan was to change public perception of the Constitution as a protection of individuals’ rights against arbitrary government power and majority sentiment into a license for radical subversives to do anything they wished to undermine the Constitution. 

In every generation when concerned citizens denounced the liberal jihad, liberal-progressive-socialists have skillfully used propaganda to make objections look like efforts to stop the right of free speech.  Liberals called it Red-Baiting in the 1920s, Black-Listing in the 1940s, and McCarthyism in the 1950s.  In today’s global-warming hysteria, with consummate PR skill liberal-progressives label questions and objections as scientific ignorance, despite the evidence that the basis for their religious faith in man-made global warming is a body of manipulated, distorted, and cherry-picked data.

Public outrage in the 1920s was no more unwarranted than today’s growing outcry against global-warming hype.  In the 1920s, the public had been battered by waves of bombings and assassination attempts by anarcho-socialists after World War I.  Most notoriously, in 1920, liberal activists planted dynamite in a wagon outside the Wall Street headquarters of J. P. Morgan, timed to detonate shortly after noon, in order to kill the maximum possible number of people on the street for lunch hour.  With shrapnel tearing through the packed sidewalk crowds, 38 people were killed and some 300 wounded. 

Such atrocities, along with secular religious belief in man-made global warming, are what liberal-progressives proudly regard as their efforts to perfect humanity. 

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page describes the latest judicial activism travesty.

For an overview of other phases of judicial activism in the United States, see the list posted in Judicial Activism - Summary of Prior Postings.

Jeff Lukens sketches our predicament and the need to navigate back to home base before it’s too late.

Hitherto the drift has been imperceptibly slow.  With the shoreline now out of sight, most of us are unaware how dangerously far we are from our starting point.  Obama may paradoxically be doing us a favor with his abrupt, radical, socialist initiatives that awaken us to our accelerating leftward drift.

For a shoreline base point see also The Unwritten Constitution.

The Choice Between Prosperity and Decline
By Jeff Lukens

This land of a free people and a free-market economy has generated a great wave of innovation that has benefited all of humanity. The essence of freedom and prosperity that moved around the world in past 200 and some years has been driven primarily by the United States. With our economy now stagnating, it has become more important than ever to return to the basic Constitutional freedoms that have made prosperity possible.

My son came home from college to visit recently. After some time of catching up on things, the conversation turned to topics that interest him—and that means all things electronic. He explained to me why I needed the latest operating system update for the computer and how properly to configure the surround sound system for the HDTV. I could barely keep up with it. Somewhere in the conversation, it occurred to me that in the long view of human history, we have come a long way in a very short time.

Think about it. In the 1600s, the ships that brought the first settlers to our shores, and tools for tilling the soil they brought with them, were not much more advanced than those used by people thousands of years before. In the relatively short time since their arrival in the New World, there has been an explosion in technology and the standard of living for ordinary people.

Communications, for example, were revolutionized first by the telegraph, then by telephone, then radio, then television, and now by the Internet and the computer. In that same time, the average length of life has been doubled, and the quality of life has been greatly enhanced. Homes, heating, cooling, clothing, transportation, food, education, and medicine have quickly advanced as well.

While people around the globe have benefited and other countries have contributed, the American spirit of innovation and free enterprise has been a driving force behind much of the change. And that change has flowed primarily from the fruits that come from the individual freedoms that the Founders understood and turned loose.

In his book, W. Cleon Skousen calls this American phenomenon “The 5000 Year Leap” that changed the world. Whether it was actually a 5000-year leap forward is hard to say, but it certainly was a giant step in the advancement of human civilization.

The Founders generally agreed that the only reliable basis for sound government and just human relations is Natural Law. The Declaration of Independence called this “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” Constitutional precepts such as unalienable rights, habeas corpus, limited government, separation of power, no taxation without representation, were based on Natural Law.

The Founders intended a government that is subservient to the people (rather than the reverse), that rights are not derived by government but by a higher power, that the free market system more than any other provides the best, most efficient and most just opportunity for individual prosperity and for the welfare of the nation as a whole.

It would be wonderful if every American studied writings of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and others that have made our great nation possible, but sadly this is not so. In our collective ignorance, we are becoming hostages to our very own government. As Ben Franklin said, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

Has our idea of “rights” become so corrupt that we are allowing the government to become our master? As the health care battle rages on Capitol Hill, could we be seeing a reversal of roles by the government and its citizens?

Today, many in Washington wish to overturn what they see to be outmoded notions of Constitutional law. We hear of conferring new, artificial rights not granted by the Creator, but by other men. The “right” to government-sponsored health care is only the latest example. And in the end, it is nothing more than a ruse intended to empower the state and deny everyone his or her true inalienable rights.

In just the past few weeks, we have seen it all. From grossly irresponsible spending of taxpayer money, to an ever-increasing national debt, to corrupt political payoffs, to expanding entitlements that we cannot pay for, the list goes on. The government corruption and mismanagement of our finances has been going on for decades, and it is getting worse. We must face the possibility that the great wave of prosperity that this nation has known from the beginning could be ending, and that our government is causing much of the decline.

The economic trend lines do not paint a pretty picture. Not to be too dramatic, but the bankruptcy of our government, a collapse of the American economy, and hence the world economy, could happen. That almost happened in the 1930s, and this time it could be worse.

One thing for certain, fixing society’s problems is not accomplished by growing government and the overstepping its constitutional role, but by a return to founding principles. For prosperity and innovation to continue, we must choose to preserve the honest relationship of self-interested individuals working in cooperation with a government of limited and divided authority.

From the beginning until today, the “noble experiment” of free people and free enterprise has produced phenomenal results. There has never been of greater need than now, however, to preserve our Constitutional principles. The future of our children is depending on it.

Jeff Lukens is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets. He can be contacted at www.jefflukens.com

When too much money is too easily attainable, however honest original designs, less honest seekers join the game. 

Greed and lust for power led bankers, from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to Wall Street, to concoct increasingly debased and uncreditworthy investment vehicles to absorb the Federal-Reserve-created flood of money.

Similarly, socialists’ lust for power and control of the world’s economy led the UN to sponsor the gigantic hoax known as man-made global warming.  With mainstream socialist media like the New York Times always ready to propagandize any claim that free-market individuals and corporations are engaged in wrong-doing, increasing numbers of climatologists discovered how to game the system. 

Liberal-progressives in Washington, swept up in this contemporary tulip-bulb mania, appropriated growing amounts of money for pseudo-scientific “research.” As we now see, most of this was merely deliberate falsification and selective use of questionable statistics that could be sold to the government, much as Wall Street sold very bad investment deals to institutional investors around the world.

Once the game was afoot, climatologists around the world joined the feeding frenzy.  Having tapped into the mother lode, climatologists, like Wall Street bankers and tort-bar lawyers, did everything possible to perpetuate their scams and to conceal from the public the true nature of their wrongdoing.

In a Wall Street Journal article dated December 26, 2009, (A Savvy Bond Man Bets Big on Inflation) reporter Jeff D. Opdyke writes:

Bill Tedford is encouraging investors to bet against remarks by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who told a group of Washington-area business leaders this month that “inflation could move lower from here.”

For more than 20 years, Mr. Tedford has run a benchmark-beating bond portfolio for Little Rock, Ark.,-based Stephens Inc. [not widely known in the general public, because it chooses to be a low-key firm, but one of the nation’s largest investment banking firms, measured by its net worth].  And though Mr. Bernanke sees slack in the economy that could push inflation down, Mr. Tedford says inflation already is evident in the consumer-price index and will lurch higher in 2010 and 2011.

He and Stephens have begun encouraging clients to invest more money in timber, oil and gas, agricultural commodities and industrial and precious metals—historically good places to be amid rising inflation…

For instance, he notes, in the 40 years to 2007 the U.S. monetary base grew at 7.08% a year. Gross domestic product, meanwhile, grew at 3.04%. The resulting surplus monetary-base growth of 4.04% closely matches CPI and the personal-consumption-expenditures price index, another measure of overall inflation.

In the wake of the U.S.-inspired global financial crisis, the nation’s monetary base has ballooned to more than $2 trillion at the end of November from less than $850 million in August 2008, before the crisis began, according to Federal Reserve data. Even subtracting the more than $1 trillion in excess reserves, the nation’s monetary base has grown by more than 11% in the past 15 months, “one of the highest changes I’ve ever measured.” Mr. Tedford says.

U.S. GDP during that period shrank by about 2%.

“The weight of that sharply increased monetary base points to significant inflation in 2010 and into 2011,” he says.

Mr. Tedford is not the only astute investment manager who is restructuring portfolios in anticipation of damaging inflation.  Both Warren Buffet and Bill Gross, chief investment officer of PIMCO, the world’s largest bond fund, are doing the same.

I dealt with this issue in an article titled Truth, some of which is quoted below.

Even before the 1917 Russian Revolution, leading universities in the United States had begun a transition from the Christian roots of our nation into atheistic, secular materialism in their teaching of the so-called social sciences.

Nominally-Christian theological seminaries were in the vanguard of the movement toward socialism.  Rochester Theological Seminary’s professor Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the best known socialist spokesmen of his era, was a founder of the Social Gospel movement late in the 19th century.  Social Gospel was nothing more nor less than socialism masquerading as Christianity. 

Social Gospel embraced the avowed aims of socialism, which sound similar to the results that flow from the Bible’s commandment to love one’s neighbor as he would wish to have his neighbor love him.  The insurmountable problem is that socialism, and therefore Social Gospel, is atheistic and materialistic, i.e., the antithesis of Christianity and religious Judaism.

To believe that Social Gospel is true Christianity is to believe that the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat was truly democratic.

In Christianizing the Social Order (1912), Professor Rauschenbusch wrote:

The Socialists found the Church against them and thought God was against them, too.  They have had to do God’s work without the sense of God’s presence to hearten them.....Whatever the sins of individual Socialists, and whatever the shortcomings of Socialist organizations, they are tools in the hands of the Almighty.......Socialism is one of the chief powers of the coming age......God will raise up Socialism because the organized Church was too blind, or too slow, to realize God’s ends.

Two other prominent seminaries, among many others, were active promoters of socialism.  Their spokesmen also were nationally known figures: Dr. Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary in New York and Dr. Bernard Iddings-Bell of St. Stephens College in Annandale, New York.

Dr. Ward wrote The New Social Order, to express sympathy for Socialism and to laud the Bolshevik revolutionary movement in Russia, which he regarded as a desirable replacement for the Russian Orthodox Christian Church.  Dr. Ward also was chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which actively defended the terrorist tactics of the radical IWW labor organization, whose members murdered more than a dozen employees and executives of industrial companies they sought to intimidate with demands for labor seizure of management control.

Dr. Iddings-Bell in Right and Wrong After the War, in this case World War I, advocated Sigmund Freud’s version of Marxian materialism, in which human life is controlled by hunger and the sex urge.  From this theory of secular and materialistic human nature, he concluded that (1) private property should be abolished; (2) income earned from investments, savings accounts, and rental property is robbery; (3) the family as a social unit should be abandoned except as a temporary arrangement for purely sexual relations. 

In his sermon delivered on May 23, 1920, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Dr. Iddings-Bell gave his support to revolutionary labor demands for abolishment of the wage system and control of industry by communistic labor unions. 

He declared that the New Social Order had arrived and that people were obliged to accept it.  Among other things, that meant that internationalism must replace American patriotism.

I also critiqued the social gospel movement in Social Activism and the Social Gospel and Religious Left: Same Old Social Gospel.

Nothing in the historical record substantiates the claim that higher CO2 in the atmosphere is is a main factor in raising earth’s temperatures.  Instead, CO2 changes follow from changes in solar activity, which is overwhelmingly the main source of earth’s heat energy.

The only real damage from continuation of present trends in energy production and use would be the frustrations endured by liberal-progressives, who are would-be world emperors lusting to imprison the rest of us in their regulatory webs.

Quote:

There are no experimental data to support the hypothesis that increases in human hydrocarbon use or in at mospheric carbon dioxide and other green house gases are causing or can be expected to cause unfavorable changes in global temperatures, weather, or landscape. There is no reason to limit human production of CO2, CH4, and other minor green house gases as has been pro posed (82,83,97,123).

We also need not worry about environmental calamities even if the current natural warming trend continues. The Earth has been much warmer during the past 3,000 years without catastrophic effects. Warmer weather extends growing seasons and generally improves the habitability of colder re gions.

As coal, oil, and natural gas are used to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe, more CO2 will be re leased into the atmosphere. This will help to maintain and improve the health, longevity, prosperity, and productivity of all people.

Read an assessment of Obamacare back-room politics by Dana Milbank, a liberal-progressiv columnist for the liberal-progressive Washington Post.

Quote:

Formally, it is known as H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. But this week, it has acquired an unhelpful nickname: “Cash for Cloture.”

As Senate Democrats finally complete their health-care legislation, those combing through the bill have uncovered many backroom deals that were made to buy, er, secure the 60 votes needed to “invoke cloture”—the legislative term for cutting off debate and holding a final vote.

First there was the “Louisiana Purchase,” $100 million in extra Medicaid money for the Bayou State, requested by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).
Then came the “Cornhusker Kickback,” another $100 million in extra Medicaid money, this time for Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.).

This was followed by word that Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) had written into the legislation $100 million meant for a medical center in his state. This one was quickly dubbed the “U Con.”...

Gator Aid: Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) inserted a grandfather clause that would allow Floridians to preserve their pricey Medicare Advantage program.
Handout Montana: Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) secured Medicare coverage for anybody exposed to asbestos—as long as they worked in a mine in Libby, Mont.

...Indeed, the proliferation of deals has outpaced the ability of Capitol Hill cynics to name them…

“That’s what legislation is all about: It’s the art of compromise,” Reid said when asked about the fairness of it all. “So this legislation is no different than the defense bill we just spent $600 billion on.” That would be the bill with more than 1,700 pet-project earmarks. “It’s no different than other pieces of legislation,” Reid continued.

And that’s just the problem.