Committee for the Constitution

Legalized Drugs: Dumber Than You May Think

CftC — Wed, 09 May 2012 13:21:40 +0000

Legalized Drugs: Dumber Than You May Think

May 2, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 32 • By JOHN P. WALTERS

Even smart people make mistakes—sometimes surprisingly large ones. A current example is drug legalization, which way too many smart people consider a good idea. They offer three bad arguments.

First, they contend, “the drug war has failed”—despite years of effort we have been unable to reduce the drug problem. Actually, as imperfect as surveys may be, they present overwhelming evidence that the drug problem is growing smaller and has fallen in response to known, effective measures. Americans use illegal drugs at substantially lower rates than when systematic measurement began in 1979—down almost 40 percent. Marijuana use is down by almost half since its peak in the late 1970s, and cocaine use is down by 80 percent since its peak in the mid-1980s. Serious challenges with crack, meth, and prescription drug abuse have not changed the broad overall trend: Drug use has declined for the last 40 years, as has drug crime.

The decades of decline coincide with tougher laws, popular disapproval of drug use, and powerful demand reduction measures such as drug treatment in the criminal justice system and drug testing. The drop also tracks successful attacks on supply—as in the reduction of cocaine production in Colombia and the successful attack on meth production in the United States. Compared with most areas of public policy, drug control measures are quite effective when properly designed and sustained.

Drug enforcement keeps the price of illegal drugs at hundreds of times the simple cost of producing them. To destroy the criminal market, legalization would have to include a massive price cut, dramatically stimulating use and addiction. Legalization advocates typically ignore the science. Risk varies a bit, but all of us and a variety of other living things—monkeys, rats, and mice—can become addicted if exposed to addictive substances in sufficient concentrations, frequently enough, and over a sufficient amount of time. It is beyond question that more people using drugs, more frequently, will result in more addiction.

About a third of illegal drug users are thought to be addicted (or close enough to it to need treatment), and the actual number is probably higher. There are now at least 21 million drug users, and at least 7 million need treatment. How much could that rise? Well, there are now almost 60 million cigarette smokers and over 130 million who use alcohol each month. It is irrational to believe that legalization would not increase addiction by millions.

We can learn from experience. Legalization has been tried in various forms, and every nation that has tried it has reversed course sooner or later. America’s first cocaine epidemic occurred in the late 19th century, when there were no laws restricting the sale or use of the drug. That epidemic led to some of the first drug laws, and the epidemic subsided. Over a decade ago the Netherlands was the model for legalization. However, the Dutch have reversed course, as have Sweden and Britain (twice). The newest example for legalization advocates is Portugal, but as time passes the evidence there grows of rising crime, blood-borne disease, and drug usage.

The lessons of history are the lessons of the street. Sections of our cities have tolerated or accepted the sale and use of drugs. We can see for ourselves that life is not the same or better in these places, it is much worse. If they can, people move away and stay away. Every instance of legalization confirms that once you increase the number of drug users and the addicted, it is difficult to undo your mistake.

The most recent form of legalization—pretending smoked marijuana is medicine—is following precisely the pattern of past failure. The majority of the states and localities that have tried it are moving to correct their mistake, from California to Michigan. Unfortunately, Washington, D.C., is about to start down this paths. It will end badly.

The second false argument for legalization is that drug laws have filled our prisons with low-level, non-violent offenders. The prison population has increased substantially over the past 30 years, but the population on probation is much larger and has grown almost as fast. The portion of the prison population associated with drug offenses has been declining, not growing. The number of diversion programs for substance abusers who commit crimes has grown to such an extent that the criminal justice system is now the single largest reason Americans enter drug treatment.

Despite constant misrepresentation of who is in prison and why, the criminal justice system has steadily and effectively focused on violent and repeat offenders. The unfortunate fact is that there are too many people in prison because there are too many criminals. With the rare exceptions that can be expected from human institutions, the criminal justice system is not convicting the innocent.

Most recently, crime and violence in Central America and Mexico have become the third bad reason to legalize drugs. Even some foreign leaders have joined in claiming that violent groups in Latin America would be substantially weakened or eliminated if drugs were legal.

Many factors have driven this misguided argument. First, while President Álvaro Uribe in Colombia and President Felipe Calderón in Mexico demonstrated brave and consequential leadership against crime and terror, such leadership is rare. For both the less competent and the corrupt, the classic response in politics is to blame someone else for your failure.

The real challenge is to establish the rule of law in places that have weak, corrupt, or utterly inadequate institutions of justice. Yes, the cartels and violent gangs gain money from the drug trade, but they engage in the full range of criminal activities—murder for hire, human trafficking, bank robbery, protection rackets, car theft, and kidnapping, among others. They seek to control areas and rule with organized criminal force. This is not a new phenomenon, and legalizing drugs will not stop it. In fact, U.S. drug laws are a powerful means of working with foreign partners to attack violent groups and bring their leaders to justice.

Legalization advocates usually claim that alcohol prohibition caused organized crime in the United States and its repeal ended the threat. This is widely believed and utterly false. Criminal organizations existed before and after prohibition. Violent criminal organizations exist until they are destroyed by institutions of justice, by each other, or by authoritarian measures fueled by popular fear. No honest criminal justice official or family in this hemisphere will be safer tomorrow if drugs are legalized—and the serious among them know it.

Are the calls for legalization merely superficial—silly background noise in the context of more fundamental problems? Does this talk make any difference? Well, suppose someone you know said, “Crack and heroin and meth are great, and I am going to give them to my brothers and sisters, my children and my grandchildren.” If you find that statement absurd, irresponsible, or obscene, then at some level you appreciate that drugs cannot be accepted in civilized society. Those who talk of legalization do not speak about giving drugs to their families, of course; they seem to expect drugs to victimize someone else’s family.

Irresponsible talk of legalization weakens public resolve against use and addiction. It attacks the moral clarity that supports responsible behavior and the strength of key institutions. Talk of legalization today has a real cost to our families and families in other places. The best remedy would be some thoughtful reflection on the drug problem and what we say about it.

Treason

CftC — Wed, 09 May 2012 12:27:35 +0000

What would you say if you learned that a member of the highest court in the land has spent the last 30 years openly advocating for the destruction of the U.S. Constitution and even went so far as to accept $20 million from Shariah Law proponents to accomplish her goal?That Supreme Court Justice is Elena Kagan.The year after Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office with the goal of restoring America to greatness; Elena Kagan penned a telling and disturbing senior thesis titled “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933.” In that body of work, Kagan lamented that “a coherent socialist movement is nowhere to be found in the United States”; and that,” no “radical party” had yet “attained the status of a major political force.” Kagan went on to sound a rally cry for “those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America.”

Apparently, this was no mere college dalliance, as the Elena Kagan has spent the rest of her career working to remove the underpinnings of freedom and destroy the American Constitution from within. And Kagan’s grand plan has worked very well indeed.

After graduate school Kagan went on to become Dean of Harvard Law, where she removed Constitutional Law classes from the curriculum, and replaced those necessary and time honored classes with required studies of international law. And in what appears to be a game of using a mutual enemy’s resources to accomplish ones’ true objective, Kagan also accepted a $20 million grant from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal – a noted Shariah Law proponent – to implement an “Islamic Studies” program.

Lest we think Kagan’s intentions are ancient history, take a look at her line of questioning when hearing the ObamaCare case last week.

Rather than question the thinly veiled socialist Trojan horse as an affront to our Constitution, Kagan almost seemed willing to defend ObamaCare and salvage the master plan to fundamentally change America into a new Euro-socialist model.By definition, our Supreme Court is charged with upholding, defending and preserving the United States Constitution. The Judges on the Supreme Court are meant to protect our freedom, not destroy it. To do otherwise is nothing short of treason.“Oran’s Dictionary of the Law (1983) defines treason as an attempt to ‘overthrow, make war against, or seriously injure the [parent nation].’”

Destruction of the Constitution is an attempt to overthrow and seriously injure America. Elena Kagan’s lifetime of actions lay bare a clear intention to subvert our Constitution and its founding principles, thereby rendering her UNFIT FOR DUTY as a Supreme Court Justice.

ObamaCare is not the end of the line. The Supreme Court will continue to weigh the constitutionality of numerous cases. The fact is that Elena Kagan is an activist judge with hatred toward the very document she is sworn to protect. As such, Elena Kagan must immediately be removed from the bench if our Constitution and America is to survive.

TELL CONGRESS TO REMOVE KAGAN NOW!

Defend America,
Alan M. Gottlieb
Chairman, AmeriPAC

America’s Most Biblically Hostile U. S. President

CftC — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 18:41:17 +0000

America’s Most Biblically Hostile U. S. President

David Barton

February 29, 2012

When one observes President Obama’s unwillingness to accommodate America’s four-century long religious conscience protection through his attempts to require Catholics to go against their own doctrines and beliefs, one is tempted to say that he is anti-Catholic. But that characterization would not be correct. Although he has recently singled out Catholics, he has equally targeted traditional Protestant beliefs over the past four years. So since he has attacked Catholics and Protestants, one is tempted to say that he is anti-Christian. But that, too, would be inaccurate. He has been equally disrespectful in his appalling treatment of religious Jews in general and Israel in particular. So perhaps the most accurate description of his antipathy toward Catholics, Protestants, religious Jews, and the Jewish nation would be to characterize him as anti-Biblical. And then when his hostility toward Biblical people of faith is contrasted with his preferential treatment of Muslims and Muslim nations, it further strengthens the accuracy of the anti-Biblical descriptor. In fact, there have been numerous clearly documented times when his pro-Islam positions have been the cause of his anti-Biblical actions.

Listed below in chronological order are (1) numerous records of his attacks on Biblical persons or organizations; (2) examples of the hostility toward Biblical faith that have become evident in the past three years in the Obama-led military; (3) a listing of his open attacks on Biblical values; and finally (4) a listing of numerous incidents of his preferential deference for Islam’s activities and positions, including letting his Islamic advisors guide and influence his hostility toward people of Biblical faith.

1. Acts of hostility toward people of Biblical faith:

April 2008 – Obama speaks disrespectfully of Christians, saying they “cling to guns or religion” and have an “antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” ¹
February 2009 – Obama announces plans to revoke conscience protection for health workers who refuse to participate in medical activities that go against their beliefs, and fully implements the plan in February 2011. ²
April 2009 – When speaking at Georgetown University, Obama orders that a monogram symbolizing Jesus’ name be covered when he is making his speech. ³
May 2009 – Obama declines to host services for the National Prayer Day (a day established by federal law) at the White House. ⁴
April 2009 – In a deliberate act of disrespect, Obama nominated three pro-abortion ambassadors to the Vatican; of course, the pro-life Vatican rejected all three. ⁵
October 19, 2010 – Obama begins deliberately omitting the phrase about “the Creator” when quoting the Declaration of Independence – an omission he has made on no less than seven occasions. ⁶
November 2010 – Obama misquotes the National Motto, saying it is “E pluribus unum” rather than “In God We Trust” as established by federal law. ⁷
January 2011 – After a federal law was passed to transfer a WWI Memorial in the Mojave Desert to private ownership, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that the cross in the memorial could continue to stand, but the Obama administration refused to allow the land to be transferred as required by law, and refused to allow the cross to be re-erected as ordered by the Court. ⁸
February 2011 – Although he filled posts in the State Department, for more than two years Obama did not fill the post of religious freedom ambassador, an official that works against religious persecution across the world; he filled it only after heavy pressure from the public and from Congress. ⁹
April 2011 – For the first time in American history, Obama urges passage of a non-discrimination law that does not contain hiring protections for religious groups, forcing religious organizations to hire according to federal mandates without regard to the dictates of their own faith, thus eliminating conscience protection in hiring. ¹⁰
August 2011 – The Obama administration releases its new health care rules that override religious conscience protections for medical workers in the areas of abortion and contraception. ¹¹
November 2011 – Obama opposes inclusion of President Franklin Roosevelt’s famous D-Day Prayer in the WWII Memorial. ¹²
November 2011 – Unlike previous presidents, Obama studiously avoids any religious references in his Thanksgiving speech. ¹³
December 2011 – The Obama administration denigrates other countries’ religious beliefs as an obstacle to radical homosexual rights. ¹⁴
January 2012 – The Obama administration argues that the First Amendment provides no protection for churches and synagogues in hiring their pastors and rabbis. ¹⁵
February 2012 – The Obama administration forgives student loans in exchange for public service, but announces it will no longer forgive student loans if the public service is related to religion. ¹⁶

2. Acts of hostility from the Obama-led military toward people of Biblical faith:

June 2011 – The Department of Veterans Affairs forbids references to God and Jesus during burial ceremonies at Houston National Cemetery. ¹⁷
August 2011 – The Air Force stops teaching the Just War theory to officers in California because the course is taught by chaplains and is based on a philosophy introduced by St. Augustine in the third century AD – a theory long taught by civilized nations across the world (except America). ¹⁸
September 2011 – Air Force Chief of Staff prohibits commanders from notifying airmen of programs and services available to them from chaplains. ¹⁹
September 2011 – The Army issues guidelines for Walter Reed Medical Center stipulating that “No religious items (i.e. Bibles, reading materials and/or facts) are allowed to be given away or used during a visit.” ²⁰
November 2011 – The Air Force Academy rescinds support for Operation Christmas Child, a program to send holiday gifts to impoverished children across the world, because the program is run by a Christian charity. ²¹
November 2011 – The Air Force Academy pays $80,000 to add a Stonehenge-like worship center for pagans, druids, witches and Wiccans. ²²
February 2012 – The U. S. Military Academy at West Point disinvites three star Army general and decorated war hero Lieutenant General William G. (“Jerry”) Boykin (retired) from speaking at an event because he is an outspoken Christian. ²³
February 2012 – The Air Force removes “God” from the patch of Rapid Capabilities Office (the word on the patch was in Latin: Dei). ²⁴
February 2012 – The Army orders Catholic chaplains not to read a letter to parishioners that their archbishop asked them to read. ²⁵

3. Acts of hostility toward Biblical values:

January 2009 – Obama lifts restrictions on U.S. government funding for groups that provide abortion services or counseling abroad, forcing taxpayers to fund pro-abortion groups that either promote or perform abortions in other nations. ²⁶
January 2009 – President Obama’s nominee for deputy secretary of state asserts that American taxpayers are required to pay for abortions and that limits on abortion funding are unconstitutional. ²⁷
March 2009 – The Obama administration shut out pro-life groups from attending a White House-sponsored health care summit. ²⁸
March 2009 – Obama orders taxpayer funding of embryonic stem cell research. ²⁹
March 2009 – Obama gave $50 million for the UNFPA, the UN population agency that promotes abortion and works closely with Chinese population control officials who use forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations. ³⁰
May 2009 – The White House budget eliminates all funding for abstinence-only education and replaces it with “comprehensive” sexual education, repeatedly proven to increase teen pregnancies and abortions. ³¹ He continues the deletion in subsequent budgets. ³²
May 2009 – Obama officials assemble a terrorism dictionary calling pro-life advocates violent and charging that they use racism in their “criminal” activities. ³³
July 2009 – The Obama administration illegally extends federal benefits to same-sex partners of Foreign Service and Executive Branch employees, in direction violation of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. ³⁴
September 16, 2009 – The Obama administration appoints as EEOC Commissioner Chai Feldblum, who asserts that society should “not tolerate” any “private beliefs,” including religious beliefs, if they may negatively affect homosexual “equality.” ³⁵
July 2010 – The Obama administration uses federal funds in violation of federal law to get Kenya to change its constitution to include abortion. ³⁶
August 2010 – The Obama administration Cuts funding for 176 abstinence education programs. ³⁷
September 2010 – The Obama administration tells researchers to ignore a judge’s decision striking down federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. ³⁸
February 2011 – Obama directs the Justice Department to stop defending the federal Defense of Marriage Act. ³⁹
March 2011 – The Obama administration refuses to investigate videos showing Planned Parenthood helping alleged sex traffickers get abortions for victimized underage girls. ⁴⁰
July 2011 – Obama allows homosexuals to serve openly in the military, reversing a policy originally instituted by George Washington in March 1778. ⁴¹
September 2011 – The Pentagon directs that military chaplains may perform same-sex marriages at military facilities in violation of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. ⁴²
October 2011 – The Obama administration eliminates federal grants to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for their extensive programs that aid victims of human trafficking because the Catholic Church is anti-abortion. ⁴³

4. Acts of preferentialism for Islam:

May 2009 – While Obama does not host any National Day of Prayer event at the White House, he does host White House Iftar dinners in honor of Ramadan. ⁴⁴
April 2010 – Christian leader Franklin Graham is disinvited from the Pentagon’s National Day of Prayer Event because of complaints from the Muslim community. ⁴⁵
April 2010 – The Obama administration requires rewriting of government documents and a change in administration vocabulary to remove terms that are deemed offensive to Muslims, including jihad, jihadists, terrorists, radical Islamic, etc. ⁴⁶
August 2010 – Obama speaks with great praise of Islam and condescendingly of Christianity. ⁴⁷
August 2010 – Obama went to great lengths to speak out on multiple occasions on behalf of building an Islamic mosque at Ground Zero, while at the same time he was silent about a Christian church being denied permission to rebuild at that location. ⁴⁸
2010 – While every White House traditionally issues hundreds of official proclamations and statements on numerous occasions, this White House avoids traditional Biblical holidays and events but regularly recognizes major Muslim holidays, as evidenced by its 2010 statements on Ramadan, Eid-ul-Fitr, Hajj, and Eid-ul-Adha. ⁴⁹
October 2011 – Obama’s Muslim advisers block Middle Eastern Christians’ access to the White House. ⁵⁰
February 2012 – The Obama administration makes effulgent apologies for Korans being burned by the U. S. military, ⁵¹ but when Bibles were burned by the military, numerous reasons were offered why it was the right thing to do. ⁵²

Many of these actions are literally unprecedented – this is the first time they have happened in four centuries of American history. The hostility of President Obama toward Biblical faith and values is without equal from any previous American president.

Endnotes

1. Sarah Pulliam Baily, “Obama: ‘They cling to guns or religion’,” Christianity Today, April 13, 2008.

2. Aliza Marcus, “Obama to Lift ‘Conscience’ Rule for Health Workers,” Bloomberg, February 27, 2009; Sarah Pulliam Baily, “Obama Admin. Changes Bush ‘Conscience’ Rule for Health Workers,” Christianity Today, February 18, 2011.

3. Jim Lovino, “Jesus Missing From Obama’s Georgetown Speech,” NBC Washington, April 17, 2009.

4. Johanna Neuman, “Obama end Bush-era National Prayer Day Service at White House,” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 2009.

5. Chris McGreal, “Vatican vetoes Barack Obama’s nominees for U.S. Ambassador,” The Guardian, April 14, 2009.

6. Meredith Jessup, “Obama Continues to Omit ‘Creator’ From Declaration of Independence,” The Blaze, October 19, 2010.

7. “Remarks by the President at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, Indonesia,” The White House, November 10, 2010.

8. LadyImpactOhio, “ Feds sued by Veterans to allow stolen Mojave Desert Cross to be rebuilt,” Red State, January 14, 2011.

9. Marrianne Medlin, “Amid criticism, President Obama moves to fill vacant religious ambassador post,” Catholic News Agency, February 9, 2011; Thomas F. Farr, “Undefender of the Faith,” Foreign Policy, April 5, 2012.

10. Chris Johnson, “ENDA passage effort renewed with Senate introduction,” Washington Blade, April 15, 2011.

11. Chuck Donovan, “HHS’s New Health Guidelines Trample on Conscience,” Heritage Foundation, August 2, 2011.

12. Todd Starns, “Obama Administration Opposes FDR Prayer at WWII Memorial,” Fox News, November 4, 2011.

13. Joel Siegel, “Obama Omits God From Thanksgiving Speech, Riles Critics,” ABC News, November 25, 2011.

14. Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Remarks in Recognition of International Human Rights Day,” U.S. Department of State, December 6, 2011.

15. Ted Olson, “Church Wins Firing Case at Supreme Court,” Christianity Today, January 11, 2012.

16. Audrey Hudson, “Obama administration religious service for student loan forgiveness,” Human Events, February 15, 2012.

17. “Houston Veterans Claim Censorship of Prayers, Including Ban of ‘God’ and ‘Jesus’,” Fox News, June 29, 2011.

18. Jason Ukman, “Air Force suspends ethics course that used Bible passages that train missle launch officers,” Washington Post, August 2, 2011.

19. “Maintaining Government Neutrality Regarding Religion,” Department of the Air Force, September 1, 2011.

20. “Wounded, Ill, and Injured Partners in Care Guidelines,” Department of the Navy (accessed on February 29, 2012).

21. “Air Force Academy Backs Away from Christmas Charity,” Fox News Radio, November 4, 2011.

22. Jenny Dean, “Air Force Academy adapts to pagans, druids, witches and Wiccans,” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 2011.

23. Ken Blackwell, “Gen. Boykin Blocked At West Point,” cnsnews.com, February 1, 2012.

24. Geoff Herbert, ” Air Force unit removes ‘God’ from logo; lawmakers warn of ‘dangerous precedent’,” syracuse.com, February 9, 2012.

25. Todd Starnes, “Army Silences Catholic Chaplains,” Fox News Radio, February 6, 2012.

26. Jeff Mason and Deborah Charles, “Obama lifts restrictions on abortion funding,” Reuters, January 23, 2009.

27. “Obama pick: Taxpayers must fund abortions,” World Net Daily, January 27, 2009.

28. Steven Ertelt, “Pro-Life Groups Left Off Obama’s Health Care Summit List, Abortion Advocates OK,” LifeNews, March 5, 2009.

29. “ Obama Signs Order Lifting Restrictions on Stem Cell Research Funding,” Fox News, March 9, 2009.

30. Steven Ertelt, “ Obama Administration Announces $50 Million for Pro-Forced Abortion UNFPA,” LifeNews, March 26, 2009; Steven Ertelt, “President Barack Obama’s Pro-Abortion Record: A Pro-Life Compilation,” LifeNews, February 11, 2012.

31. Steven Ertelt, “Barack Obama’s Federal Budget Eliminates Funding for Abstinence-Only Education,” LifeNews, May 8, 2009.

32. Steven Ertelt, “Obama Budget Funds Sex Ed Over Abstinence on 16-1 Margin,” LifeNews, February 14, 2011.

33. Steven Ertelt, “Obama Admin Terrorism Dictionary Calls Pro-Life Advocates Violent, Racist,” LifeNews, May 5, 2009.

34. “Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies,” The White House, June 17, 2009.

35. Matt Cover, “Obama’s EEOC Nominee: Society Should ‘Not Tolerate Private Beliefs’ That ‘Adversely Affect’ Homosexuals,” cnsnews.com, January 18, 2010.

36. Tess Civantos, “White House Spent $23M of Taxpayer Money to Back Kenyan Constitution That Legalizes Abortion, GOP Reps Say,” Fox News, July 22, 2010.

37. Steven Ertelt, “Obama, Congress Cut Funding for 176 Abstinence Programs Despite New Study,” LifeNews, August 26, 2010.

38. Steven Ertelt, “President Barack Obama’s Pro-Abortion Record: A Pro-Life Compilation,” LifeNews, February 11, 2012.

39. Brian Montopoli, “Obama administration will no longer defend DOMA,” CBSNews, February 23, 2011.

40. Steven Ertelt, “Obama Admin Ignores Planned Parenthood Sex Trafficking Videos,” LifeNews, March 2, 2011.

41. Elisabeth Bumiller, “Obama Ends ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Policy,” New York Times, July 22, 2011; George Washington, The Writings of George Washington, John C. Fitzpatrick, editor (Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1934), Vol. XI, pp. 83-84, from General Orders at Valley Forge on March 14, 1778.

42. Luis Martinez, “Will Same Sex Marriages Pose a Dilemma for Military Chaplains?,” ABC News, October 12, 2011.

43. Jerry Markon, “Health, abortion issues split Obama administration and Catholic groups,” Washington Post, October 31, 2011.

44. Barack Obama, “ Remarks by the President at Iftar Dinner,” The White House, September 1, 2009; Kristi Keck, “ Obama tones down National Day of Prayer observance,” CNN, May 6, 2009; Dan Gilgoff, “ The White House on National Day of Prayer: A Proclamation, but No Formal Ceremony,” U.S. News, May 1, 2009.

45. “Franklin Graham Regrets Army’s Decision to Rescind Invite to Pentagon Prayer Service,” Fox News, April 22, 2010.

46. “Obama Bans Islam, Jihad From National Security Strategy Document,” Fox News, April 7, 2010; “Counterterror Adviser Defends Jihad as ‘Legitimate Tenet of Islam’,” Fox News, May 27, 2010; “‘Islamic Radicalism’ Nixed From Obama Document,” CBSNews, April 7, 2010.

47. Chuck Norris, “ President Obama: Muslim Missionary? (Part 2),” Townhall.com, August 24, 2010; Chuck Norris, “President Obama: Muslim Missionary?,” Townhall.com, August 17, 2010.

48. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at Iftar Dinner,” The White House, August 13, 2010; “Obama Comes Out in Favor of Allowing Mosque Near Ground Zero,” Fox News, August 13, 2010; Pamela Geller, “Islamic Supremacism Trumps Christianity at Ground Zero,” American Thinker, July 21, 2011.

49. “WH Fails to Release Easter Proclamation,” Fox Nation, April 25, 2011; “President Obama ignores most holy Christian holiday; AFA calls act intentional,” American Family Association (accessed on February 29, 2012).

50. “Report: Obama’s Muslim Advisers Block Middle Eastern Christians’ Access to the White House,” Big Peace (accessed on February 29, 2012).

51. Masoud Popalzai and Nick Paton Walsh, “ Obama apologizes to Afghanistan for Quran burning,” CNN, February 23, 2012; “USA/Afghanistan-Islamophobia: Pentagon official apologizes for Quran burning,” International Islamic News Agency (accessed on February 29, 2012).

52. “Military burns unsolicited Bibles sent to Afghanistan,” CNN, May 22, 2009.

From the Seed

CftC — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 19:40:09 +0000

From the Seed

A simple explanation of why Barack Obama is so focused on destroying all that the Framers intended for America is evinced and exposed in the totality of his past. Certainly persons repenting of past failures and actions can change. But from childhood on, this man’s course was formed and directed by those embracing ideologies and faiths diametrically opposed to and opposite of the Framers’ original intention. Shaping Obama’s character and motivation manifesting in the betrayal of the trust of patriotic Americans loyal to the original intention of the Constitution are the enemies of truth and justice. Ignoring the truths of science and history, those attacking America are aided and abetted by the propaganda spewing from the cesspools of the liberal media funded by those resting in blessings already afforded to them because of all that the America they are seeking to destroy has provided them. Before those politically bribed and unaware of the truth elected Obama, this Committee for the Constitution published many articles warning of the threat to freedom and justice for all represented in this foreign born person ineligible to hold the “highest office of honor and trust” in this “one Nation under God”. Combining The Perfect Stranger, Krauthammer On Obama, Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis, and Barack Obama: Red Diaper Baby, there is a repetitive pattern and foundation answering not only David Barton’s rhetorical question as to why Obama is “America’s Most Biblically Hostile U. S. President“, but why all that made America great is being attacked and destroyed by what many call a traitor in our midst.

America needs a leader of truth and integrity, a person calling to science and history, a person seeking only to serve and reclaim a heritage lost to the greed and ignorance of those in the congregations of humanism led by lies and deceptions. The Truth shall set us free!

CftC

More on the Economy – the Fed to Wall Street to “Crony Capitalism” and Executive Complicity

CftC — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 18:35:05 +0000

More on the Economy – the Fed to Wall Street to “Crony Capitalism” and Executive Complicity

The Committee for the Constitution published an article entitled Without Representation – We Need a Leader Rather Than a Politician where the Federal Reserve loaned failing American and foreign banks and U.S. corporations money printed for the purpose or embezzled from the public. The following articles shed additional light on the political bankruptcy and betrayal by government in bed with the healthcare systems, the liberal media spewing the propaganda of lie and deceptions, and corporate and political bureaucracies extorting the just wages and freedoms intended to be protected by the original intention of the Constitution.

Looking no further than the underlying causes of the economic meltdown precipitating the global financial disaster we see government failures to hold to the Framers’ intention. Nowhere in any of their writings is there any deviation from the implicit foundation of law addressing the realities of human behavior as expressed in their Christian Biblical worldview. From the Plymouth colony forward every form of socialism was rejected. Simply, if you didn’t work you did not earn the blessings available to those who did. Free enterprise and free markets driven by equal opportunity in “the pursuit of Happiness” and unregulated competition bound only by “justice for all” were the standard for their economic intention. “Religion and morality are indispensible supports for our form of government.” The word speculative highlighted below would most certainly equate to “gambling” in their eyes. Even in this day, those having strayed from, rejecting, or dismissing the original Constitutional intention acknowledge that they are using and risking money they have not earned — other people’s earnings and savings — in gambling for their own gain. Coupled with their injustice, those squandering the public trust are enabled by the undeserving eagerly looking for something for nothing and more than willing to unjustly accept the fruit of others’ righteous labor.

CftC

Business Former Reagan Budget Director Despairs: ‘I Wouldn’t Touch the Stock Market With a 100-Foot Pole’

March 3, 2012 by Becket Adams

NEW YORK (AP/The Blaze) — He was an architect of one of the biggest tax cuts in U.S. history. He spent much of his career after politics using borrowed money to take over companies. He targeted the riskiest ones that most investors shunned — car-parts makers, textile mills.

That is one image of David Stockman, the former White House budget director who, after resigning in protest over deficit spending, made a fortune in corporate buyouts.

CTRL + Click to follow link" src="http://www.theblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Ronaldus-Stockman.png" alt="Former Reagan Budget Director Despairs: I Wouldnt Touch the Stock Market With a 100 Foot Pole" width="566" height="425" />

President Ronald Reagan with David Stockman

But spend time with him and you discover this former wunderkind of the Reagan revolution is something else — a scared investor who doesn’t own a single stock for fear of another financial crisis.

Stockman suggests you’d be crazy to hold anything but cash now, and maybe a few bars of gold. He thinks the Federal Reserve’s efforts to ease the pain from the collapse of our “national leveraged buyout” — his term for decades of reckless, debt-fueled spending by government, citizens, and companies — is pumping stock and bond markets to dangerous heights.

Stockman may seem as exciting as an insurance actuary, but he knows how to tell a good story. And the punch line to this one is gripping. He says the numbers for the U.S. don’t add up to anything but a painful, slow-growing future.

Now 65 and gray, but still wearing his trademark owlish glasses, Stockman took time from writing his book about the financial collapse, “The Triumph of Crony Capitalism,” to talk to The Associated Press at his home in Greenwich, CT.

Here are excerpts from the AP interview [emphases added]:

Q: Why are you so down on the U.S. economy?

.
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A: It’s become super-saturated with debt.

Typically, the private and public sectors would borrow $1.50 or $1.60 each year for every $1 of GDP growth. That was the golden constant. It had been at that ratio for 100 years save for some minor squiggles during the bottom of the Depression. By the time we got to the mid-’90s, we were borrowing $3 for every $1 of GDP growth. And by the time we got to the peak in 2006 or 2007, we were actually taking on $6 of new debt to grind out $1 of new GDP.People were taking $25,000, $50,000 out of their home for the fourth refinancing. That’s what was keeping the economy going, creating jobs in restaurants, creating jobs in retail, creating jobs as gardeners, creating jobs as Pilates instructors that were not supportable with organic earnings and income.

It wasn’t sustainable. It wasn’t real consumption or real income. It was bubble economics. So even the 1.6 percent (annual GDP growth in the past decade) is overstating what’s really going on in our economy.

Q: How fast can the U.S. economy grow?

A: People would say the standard is 3, 3.5 percent. I don’t even know if we could grow at 1 or 2 percent. When you have to stop borrowing at these tremendous rates, the rate of GDP expansion stops as well.

Q: But the unemployment rate is falling and companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 are making more money than ever.

A: That’s very short-term. Look at the data that really counts. The 131.7 million (jobs in November) was first achieved in February 2000. That number has gone nowhere for 12 years.

Another measure is the rate of investment in new plant and equipment. There is no sustained net investment in our economy. The rate of growth since 2000 (in what the Commerce Department calls non-residential fixed investment) has been 0.8 percent — hardly measurable.

(Non-residential fixed investment is the money put into office buildings, factories, software and other equipment.)

We’re stalled, stuck.

Q: What will 10-year Treasurys yield in a year or five years?

A: I have no guess, but I do know where it is now (a yield of about 2 percent) is totally artificial. It’s the result of massive purchases by not only the Fed but all of the other central banks of the world.

Q: What’s wrong with that?

A: It doesn’t come out of savings. It’s made up money. It’s printing press money. When the Fed buys $5 billion worth of bonds this morning, which it’s doing periodically, it simply deposits $5 billion in the bank accounts of the eight dealers they buy the bonds from.

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David Stockman, Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors Murray Weidenbaum testify before the House Budget Committee in February 1982.

Q: And what are the consequences of that?

A: The consequences are horrendous. If you could make the world rich by having all the central banks print unlimited money, then we have been making a mistake for the last several thousand years of human history.

Q: How does it end?

A: At some point confidence is lost, and people don’t want to own the (Treasury) paper. I mean why in the world, when the inflation rate has been 2.5 percent for the last 15 years, would you want to own a five-year note today at 80 basis points (0.8 percent)?

If the central banks ever stop buying, or actually begin to reduce their totally bloated, abnormal, freakishly large balance sheets, all of these speculators are going to sell their bonds in a heartbeat.

That’s what happened in Greece.

Here’s the heart of the matter. The Fed is a patsy. It is a pathetic dependent of the big Wall Street banks, traders and hedge funds. Everything (it does) is designed to keep this rickety structure from unwinding. If you had a (former Fed Chairman) Paul Volcker running the Fed today 7/8— utterly fearless and independent and willing to scare the hell out of the market any day of the week — you wouldn’t have half, you wouldn’t have 95 percent, of the speculative positions today.

Q: You sound as if we’re facing a financial crisis like the one that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

A: Oh, far worse than Lehman. When the real margin call in the great beyond arrives, the carnage will be unimaginable.

Q: How do investors protect themselves? What about the stock market?

A: I wouldn’t touch the stock market with a 100-foot pole. It’s a dangerous place. It’s not safe for men, women or children.

Q: Do you own any shares?

A: No.

Q: But the stock market is trading cheap by some measures. It’s valued at 12.5 times expected earnings this year. The typical multiple is 15 times.

A: The typical multiple is based on a historic period when the economy could grow at a standard rate. The idea that you can capitalize this market at a rate that was safe to capitalize it in 1990 or 1970 or 1955 is a large mistake. It’s a Wall Street sales pitch.

Q: Are you in short-term Treasurys?

A: I’m just in short-term, yeah. Call it cash. I have some gold. I’m not going to take any risk.

Q: Municipal bonds?

A: No.

Q: No munis, no stocks. Wow. You’re not making any money.

A: Capital preservation is what your first, second and third priority ought to be in a system that is so jerry-built, so fragile, so exposed to major breakdown that it’s not worth what you think you might be able to earn over six months or two years or three years if they can keep the bailing wire and bubble gum holding the system together, OK? It’s not worth it.

Q: Give me your prescription to fix the economy.

A: We have to eat our broccoli for a good period of time. And that means our taxes are going to go up on everybody, not just the rich. It means that we have to stop subsidizing debt by getting a sane set of people back in charge of the Fed, getting interest rates back to some kind of level that reflects the risk of holding debt over time. I think the federal funds rate ought to be 3 percent or 4 percent. (It is zero to 0.25 percent.) I mean, that’s normal in an economy with inflation at 2 percent or 3 percent.

Q: Social Security?

A: It has to be means-tested. And Medicare needs to be means-tested. If you’re a more affluent retiree, you should have your benefits cut back, pay a higher premium for Medicare.

Q: Taxes?

A: Let the Bush tax cuts expire. Let the capital gains go back to the same rate as ordinary income. (Capital gains are taxed at 15 percent, while ordinary income is taxed at marginal rates up to 35 percent.)

Q: Why?

A: Why not? I mean, is return on capital any more virtuous than some guy who’s driving a bus all day and working hard and trying to support his family? You know, with capital gains, they give you this mythology. You’re going to encourage a bunch of more jobs to appear. No, most of capital gains goes to speculators in real estate and other assets who basically lever up companies, lever up buildings, use the current income to pay the interest and after a holding period then sell the residual, the equity, and get it taxed at 15 percent. What’s so brilliant about that?

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A: Well, yeah, and maybe you can learn something from what happens over time. I was against the debt explosion in the Reagan era. I tried to fight the deficit, but I couldn’t. When I was in the private sector, I was in the leveraged buyout business. I finally learned a heck of a lot about the dangers of debt.

I’m a libertarian. If someone wants to do leveraged buyouts, more power to them. If they want to have a brothel, let them run a brothel. But it doesn’t mean that public policy ought to be biased dramatically to encourage one kind of business arrangement over another. And right now public policy and taxes and free money from the Fed are encouraging way too much debt, way too much speculation and not enough productive real investment and growth.

Q: Why are you writing a book?

A: I got so outraged by the bailouts of Wall Street in September 2008. I believed that Bush and (former Treasury Secretary Hank) Paulson were totally trashing the Reagan legacy, whatever was left, which did at least begin to resuscitate the idea of free markets and a free economy. And these characters came in and panicked and basically gave capitalism a smelly name and they made it impossible to have fiscal discipline going forward. If you’re going to bail out Wall Street, what aren’t you going to bail out? So that started my re-engagement, let’s say, in the policy debate.

Q: Are you hopeful?
A: No.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

A Closer Look at the Jan. Jobless Numbers: Are They ‘Being Made Up?’

February 7, 2012 by Becket Adams

You may recall that major media outlets rejoiced and the markets jumped last Friday when the January jobs report was released.

“Labor Department today lowered the U.S. unemployment rate by two-tenths of a point to 8.3 percent, the lowest it’s been since February 2009,” Emily Knapp of Wall St. Cheat reported, “January data showed nonfarm payrolls to have risen a whopping 243,000, wildly exceeding even the most optimistic of economists’ projections.”

However, although the markets did indeed react positively to the good news, many analysts were skeptical of the data in the report.

“A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55 [percent],” editors at Zero Hedge wrote.

“Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: it appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month!”

What does this mean?

Zero Hedge explains:

So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation.

Even conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh weighed in on the report, claiming that the data was “corrupt as it can be” because the Labor Force Participation Rate has been repeatedly adjusted.

Is Limbaugh out of line on this?

“After countless attempts to discredit or defend Friday’s jobs report, we can all agree on one thing: The data is complicated,” Gus Lubin of Business Insider writes. “So complicated that the BLS could make the economy look better than it was and no one would be sure.”

That’s more or less what David Stockman, former budget director for President Ronald Reagan, wrote in an email to former hedge fund manager Bruce Krasting.

On his blog “My Take on Financial Events,” Krasting wrote, “Is the current [Labor Force Participation Rate] a temporary phenomenon, or is this the ‘New Normal?’”

Krasting believes that if the current Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) is the “new normal,” it could have severe – even dangerous – effects on the economy.

Why?

“Virtually all of the economic models used by CBO, OMB, SSA and private economists are assuming that the long-term LFPR will be in the mid-to upper 60s. The consensus is 2-3 [percent] higher than where it is today,” Krasting writes.

“If you plug in a rate of 63 [percent] versus 67 [percent] over the next ten-years, it makes a huge difference on the size of the deficit and the public debt. It would cause the deficits at Social Security and Medicare to explode. The percentage of GDP attributable to the government would inevitably rise. The economy, and society in general, would be socialized [emphasis added],” Krasting writes.

In response to Krasting’s criticism of the jobs report, Stockman writes: “…if you spend a little time with these numbers you will know that they are being made up.”

Here’s the email (via Wall Street Examiner):

…I’m wondering if this goes much deeper. I don’t particularly believe in tin foil hats, but all of these mainstream economists treat the BLS and BEA data like it’s holy writ—when it’s evident that the reports are so massaged, estimated, deemed, revised, re-bench marked and seasonally adjusted that any month-to-month change has a decent chance of being noise. What deep secret might they be hiding?

So on the labor force participation rate they say, “No it didn’t go down in January because the 2012 numbers are re-bench marked for the 2010 census,” but for some reason the BLS didn’t bother to update the 2011 civilian population numbers, including December. Thus, the BLS published apples-to-oranges numbers on this particular variable and the footnote says the December participation rate would have been the same as January, if they had revised it!

Yet on another variable— the establishment survey jobs count—they were also busy re-benchmarking–but here they did update the originally reported numbers for every month of 2011. Even then, it is hard to say what got updated because the originally reported numbers each month are then revised during the next two reporting months—with any excess or shortfall reallocated to earlier months outside the three month window, which are not published on a revised basis, even though they have been revised! This reflects a wacko thing called the concurrent seasonal adjustment method.

… your point is that the longer-term trend of the labor force participation rate is really bad, and this truth is absolutely validated by the January report. Except it would have been equally bad in December had it been reported with the new census data…

But the mainstream narrative never gets to the trend. In this case, the plain fact is that we are warehousing a larger and larger population of adults who are one way or another living off transfer payments, relatives, sub-prime credit, and the black market. My suspicion is that this negative trend and many others like it get buried by the monthly change chatter from mainstream economists and on bubble vision, and that these monthly deltas are so heavily manipulated as to be almost a made-up reality. Call it the economists’ Truman Show.
…
In short, if you spend a little time with these numbers you will know that they are being made up. Funny thing that I remember during the depths of the 1982 recession Reagan read in Human Events one night that the seasonally adjusted numbers were being manipulated and one should look at the unadjusted numbers, instead. The next morning during an economic update briefing Reagan said, he wanted to talk about the “unadjusted” unemployment rate. Marty Feldstein turned white as a ghost, and then talked him out of it. Hmmm!

emphases added by the CftC

Common Sense Revisited, Stand and Fight, Reclaim America!

CftC — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 18:15:24 +0000

Common Sense Revisited

What seems apparent in this year’s election campaign is that Obama and the Democrats have abandoned common sense resolutions of the problems that we are facing as a nation. To return to the original intention of the Framers and Founders is to return to an approach demanding a full and complete reliance on the truths defined by science and history. Special interests supported by the propaganda of the liberal media have embarked on a campaign of smokescreens and mirrors of misinformation. Both parties are trying to fix an economic system that must return to the path charted by the prior generations of realists whose foundation of Law transcends the errors of human invention. Inadequately and inappropriately responding to the wealth and power afforded by the advances accompanying the Industrial Revolution, the politics and politicians following the devastation of our great Civil War and groundless ideologies diverted from common sense to follow a path laid out by those holding the reigns of government. Unfortunately, later moving into the 20th century, reason was largely excluded from the considerations of political action by a public satiated by well being and intermittently improving circumstances. Accepting the lies and deceptions of false science and corrupted contaminated history, tolerant of judicial activism and executive tyranny violating the original intention of the Constitution, we must now stand against injustice to defend liberty and justice for all. Only with justice for all will there be “domestic tranquility”.

In speaking of the failed experiment in socialism resulting in the near starvation and loss of the entire Plymouth colony, Governor William Bradford described its cause. “Let none argue that this is due to human failing, rather than to this communistic plan of life in itself. I answer, seeing that all men have this failing in them, that God in His wisdom saw that another plan of life was fitter for them.” Also, he addressed the failed societal and interpersonal relational consequences of socialism. “If all were to share alike and all were to do alike, then all were on an equality throughout and one was as good as another; and so, if it did not actually abolish those very relations which God himself has set among men, it did at least greatly diminish the mutual respect that is so important should be preserved amongst them.” Do we need to look any farther than the economic disasters now infecting and draining working Americans — the crime and social chaos attending undeserved government welfare programs; the economic meltdown precipitated by the Barney Franks, Medoffs, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and unrestrained unjust corporations; myriad Congressional inactions, failures, and Constitutional violations; executive tyranny, injustice, and abrogation of Constitutional mandates — to verify the indelible understanding of history penned on these shores nearly four centuries ago?

Recalling the near similar failure of the Jamestown colony brought by a similarly flawed experiment in unbridled capitalism, there is again a brilliant picture capturing the essence of the Congressional failure to adjust the political structure to impart the justice demanded by the authority of the Constitution on the economy after the Civil War. In a large part, the “unalienable Right[s], . . . . the pursuit of Happiness” has been sequestered unto the wealthy and the powerful. The interpersonal accountability and the oversight of justice associated with small business has been lost to the bureaucracies and governments seated by the bribery and false propaganda of unjust “special interests”, wealth, and political power. Politicians are far removed from the service and sacrifice of the generations that fought, died, and sweat to bring us the freedoms we now take fore granted. Freedom is never free! We are in a new civil war where the call to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” can no longer be ignored.

America! Are You Not Tired Of Politics As Usual?

For the Framers and Founders politics was never meant to be
a job. The most successful and brightest in 1776 and 1787
sacrificed to inaugurate a new era of liberty and justice for all in
history. This untried experiment in government was intended “to
form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic
Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general
Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and
our Posterity. [W]ith a firm reliance on the protection of divine
Providence”, they “pledge[d] to each other [their] Lives, [their]
Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor”.

“The preamble never can be resorted to, to enlarge the powers
confided to the general government, or any of its departments.
It cannot confer any power per se; it can never amount, by
implication, to an enlargement of any power expressly given.
It can never be the legitimate source of any implied power,
when otherwise withdrawn from the constitution. Its true
office is to expound the nature, and extent, and application
of the powers actually conferred by the constitution, and not
substantively to create them. For example, the preamble
declares one object to be, ” to provide for the common
defence.” No one can doubt, that this does not enlarge the
powers of congress to pass any measures, which they may
deem useful for the common defence.¹ But suppose the
terms of a given power admit of two constructions, the one
more restrictive, the other more liberal, and each of them is
consistent with the words, but is, and ought to be, governed
by the intent of the power; if one would promote, and the other
defeat the common defence, ought not the former, upon the
soundest principles of interpretation to be adopted? Are we at
liberty, upon any principles of reason, or common sense, to
adopt a restrictive meaning, which will defeat an avowed
object of the constitution, when another equally natural and
more appropriate to the object is before us? Would not this be
to destroy an instrument by a measure of its words, which
that instrument itself repudiates? – Justice Joseph Story,
Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, 1833,
Ch. VI. The Preamble

Clearly Justice Story of the United States Supreme Court,
being of a generation directly familiar with those in Independence
Hall in 1787 and those in the First Congress giving us our Bill of
Rights, was very aware of the Framers’ and Founders’ intentions
for this “one Nation under God”. Reading the above and applying
it to the Constitution as a whole, and particularly to Article I,
Section 8, and Amendment X, it is readily apparent that the

politicians, bureaucrats, and judges that we have erroneously

trusted to be bound by the intentions of the makers of “the

supreme law of the land” have willfully violated that trust.

From the dismissal of states’ rights, to taxation without
representation, to complete fiscal irresponsibility, to the failure
to protect us from enemies “foreign and domestic”, to saddling our
children with incomprehensible debt, to name but a few of the more
pressing usurpations and failures to obey the very basic principles
demanded in the Preamble, America is under attack.

The first step in reclaiming our heritage and restoring freedom and
justice is for every citizen to individually recall all the behaviors that
allowed us to enjoy the opportunities and blessings that were
“endowed by our Creator“. Recognized by Gov. Bradford in his Of
Plymouth Plantation, work and sacrifice have given all so willing that
opportunity. In the words of the father of our country, “religion and
morality are indispensible supports”. The fight and the responsibility
rest on each patriot. From Plymouth colony on, repeatedly confirmed

by history, socialist welfare governments — any utopian order not fully

established on the unchanging realities of human behavior — fail.

With each loyal American doing their individual part, we must then
cleanse our Nation of those contaminating and destroying all that
enabled and sustained us. The lies and deceptions of political
propaganda must join those infecting us as we hold all those that
we place in positions of public service accountable. A first step is
to bind all elected officials by contract to their oath of office.

Please join with The Committee for the Constitution in this new war

for independence by sending this message to all you have contact
with. Demand that any person seeking your vote be endorsed by
The Committee for the Constitution. Like the Minutemen, we must
take up arms and fight, and like Paul Revere we must spread the
word to all our neighbors that the enemy is upon us!

___________________________________

1 “Yet, strangely enough, this objection was urged very
vehemently against the adoption of the Constitution.
- Elliot’s debates, 293, 300.” Ibid, Story

STAND! FIGHT! RESIST THE TYRANNY!

REMOVE THOSE HAVE BETRAYED US!

ELECT ONLY THOSE LOYAL TO THE

ORIGINAL INTENTION OF THE CONSTITUTION!

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CftC

America’s Most Biblically Hostile U. S. President

CftC — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:21:56 +0000

America’s Most Biblically Hostile U. S. President

David Barton

February 29, 2012

1. Acts of hostility toward people of Biblical faith:

April 2008 – Obama speaks disrespectfully of Christians, saying they “cling to guns or religion” and have an “antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” ¹
February 2009 – Obama announces plans to revoke conscience protection for health workers who refuse to participate in medical activities that go against their beliefs, and fully implements the plan in February 2011. ²
April 2009 – When speaking at Georgetown University, Obama orders that a monogram symbolizing Jesus’ name be covered when he is making his speech. ³
May 2009 – Obama declines to host services for the National Prayer Day (a day established by federal law) at the White House. ⁴
April 2009 – In a deliberate act of disrespect, Obama nominated three pro-abortion ambassadors to the Vatican; of course, the pro-life Vatican rejected all three. ⁵
October 19, 2010 – Obama begins deliberately omitting the phrase about “the Creator” when quoting the Declaration of Independence – an omission he has made on no less than seven occasions. ⁶
November 2010 – Obama misquotes the National Motto, saying it is “E pluribus unum” rather than “In God We Trust” as established by federal law. ⁷
January 2011 – After a federal law was passed to transfer a WWI Memorial in the Mojave Desert to private ownership, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that the cross in the memorial could continue to stand, but the Obama administration refused to allow the land to be transferred as required by law, and refused to allow the cross to be re-erected as ordered by the Court. ⁸
February 2011 – Although he filled posts in the State Department, for more than two years Obama did not fill the post of religious freedom ambassador, an official that works against religious persecution across the world; he filled it only after heavy pressure from the public and from Congress. ⁹
April 2011 – For the first time in American history, Obama urges passage of a non-discrimination law that does not contain hiring protections for religious groups, forcing religious organizations to hire according to federal mandates without regard to the dictates of their own faith, thus eliminating conscience protection in hiring. ¹⁰
August 2011 – The Obama administration releases its new health care rules that override religious conscience protections for medical workers in the areas of abortion and contraception. ¹¹
November 2011 – Obama opposes inclusion of President Franklin Roosevelt’s famous D-Day Prayer in the WWII Memorial. ¹²
November 2011 – Unlike previous presidents, Obama studiously avoids any religious references in his Thanksgiving speech. ¹³
December 2011 – The Obama administration denigrates other countries’ religious beliefs as an obstacle to radical homosexual rights. ¹⁴
January 2012 – The Obama administration argues that the First Amendment provides no protection for churches and synagogues in hiring their pastors and rabbis. ¹⁵
February 2012 – The Obama administration forgives student loans in exchange for public service, but announces it will no longer forgive student loans if the public service is related to religion. ¹⁶

2. Acts of hostility from the Obama-led military toward people of Biblical faith:

June 2011 – The Department of Veterans Affairs forbids references to God and Jesus during burial ceremonies at Houston National Cemetery. ¹⁷
August 2011 – The Air Force stops teaching the Just War theory to officers in California because the course is taught by chaplains and is based on a philosophy introduced by St. Augustine in the third century AD – a theory long taught by civilized nations across the world (except America). ¹⁸
September 2011 – Air Force Chief of Staff prohibits commanders from notifying airmen of programs and services available to them from chaplains. ¹⁹
September 2011 – The Army issues guidelines for Walter Reed Medical Center stipulating that “No religious items (i.e. Bibles, reading materials and/or facts) are allowed to be given away or used during a visit.” ²⁰
November 2011 – The Air Force Academy rescinds support for Operation Christmas Child, a program to send holiday gifts to impoverished children across the world, because the program is run by a Christian charity. ²¹
November 2011 – The Air Force Academy pays $80,000 to add a Stonehenge-like worship center for pagans, druids, witches and Wiccans. ²²
February 2012 – The U. S. Military Academy at West Point disinvites three star Army general and decorated war hero Lieutenant General William G. (“Jerry”) Boykin (retired) from speaking at an event because he is an outspoken Christian. ²³
February 2012 – The Air Force removes “God” from the patch of Rapid Capabilities Office (the word on the patch was in Latin: Dei). ²⁴
February 2012 – The Army orders Catholic chaplains not to read a letter to parishioners that their archbishop asked them to read. ²⁵

3. Acts of hostility toward Biblical values:

January 2009 – Obama lifts restrictions on U.S. government funding for groups that provide abortion services or counseling abroad, forcing taxpayers to fund pro-abortion groups that either promote or perform abortions in other nations. ²⁶
January 2009 – President Obama’s nominee for deputy secretary of state asserts that American taxpayers are required to pay for abortions and that limits on abortion funding are unconstitutional. ²⁷
March 2009 – The Obama administration shut out pro-life groups from attending a White House-sponsored health care summit. ²⁸
March 2009 – Obama orders taxpayer funding of embryonic stem cell research. ²⁹
March 2009 – Obama gave $50 million for the UNFPA, the UN population agency that promotes abortion and works closely with Chinese population control officials who use forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations. ³⁰
May 2009 – The White House budget eliminates all funding for abstinence-only education and replaces it with “comprehensive” sexual education, repeatedly proven to increase teen pregnancies and abortions. ³¹ He continues the deletion in subsequent budgets. ³²
May 2009 – Obama officials assemble a terrorism dictionary calling pro-life advocates violent and charging that they use racism in their “criminal” activities. ³³
July 2009 – The Obama administration illegally extends federal benefits to same-sex partners of Foreign Service and Executive Branch employees, in direction violation of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. ³⁴
September 16, 2009 – The Obama administration appoints as EEOC Commissioner Chai Feldblum, who asserts that society should “not tolerate” any “private beliefs,” including religious beliefs, if they may negatively affect homosexual “equality.” ³⁵
July 2010 – The Obama administration uses federal funds in violation of federal law to get Kenya to change its constitution to include abortion. ³⁶
August 2010 – The Obama administration Cuts funding for 176 abstinence education programs. ³⁷
September 2010 – The Obama administration tells researchers to ignore a judge’s decision striking down federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. ³⁸
February 2011 – Obama directs the Justice Department to stop defending the federal Defense of Marriage Act. ³⁹
March 2011 – The Obama administration refuses to investigate videos showing Planned Parenthood helping alleged sex traffickers get abortions for victimized underage girls. ⁴⁰
July 2011 – Obama allows homosexuals to serve openly in the military, reversing a policy originally instituted by George Washington in March 1778. ⁴¹
September 2011 – The Pentagon directs that military chaplains may perform same-sex marriages at military facilities in violation of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. ⁴²
October 2011 – The Obama administration eliminates federal grants to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for their extensive programs that aid victims of human trafficking because the Catholic Church is anti-abortion. ⁴³

4. Acts of preferentialism for Islam:

May 2009 – While Obama does not host any National Day of Prayer event at the White House, he does host White House Iftar dinners in honor of Ramadan. ⁴⁴
April 2010 – Christian leader Franklin Graham is disinvited from the Pentagon’s National Day of Prayer Event because of complaints from the Muslim community. ⁴⁵
April 2010 – The Obama administration requires rewriting of government documents and a change in administration vocabulary to remove terms that are deemed offensive to Muslims, including jihad, jihadists, terrorists, radical Islamic, etc. ⁴⁶
August 2010 – Obama speaks with great praise of Islam and condescendingly of Christianity. ⁴⁷
August 2010 – Obama went to great lengths to speak out on multiple occasions on behalf of building an Islamic mosque at Ground Zero, while at the same time he was silent about a Christian church being denied permission to rebuild at that location. ⁴⁸
2010 – While every White House traditionally issues hundreds of official proclamations and statements on numerous occasions, this White House avoids traditional Biblical holidays and events but regularly recognizes major Muslim holidays, as evidenced by its 2010 statements on Ramadan, Eid-ul-Fitr, Hajj, and Eid-ul-Adha. ⁴⁹
October 2011 – Obama’s Muslim advisers block Middle Eastern Christians’ access to the White House. ⁵⁰
February 2012 – The Obama administration makes effulgent apologies for Korans being burned by the U. S. military, ⁵¹ but when Bibles were burned by the military, numerous reasons were offered why it was the right thing to do. ⁵²

Endnotes

1. Sarah Pulliam Baily, “Obama: ‘They cling to guns or religion’,” Christianity Today, April 13, 2008.
2. Aliza Marcus, “Obama to Lift ‘Conscience’ Rule for Health Workers,” Bloomberg, February 27, 2009; Sarah Pulliam Baily, “Obama Admin. Changes Bush ‘Conscience’ Rule for Health Workers,” Christianity Today, February 18, 2011.
3. Jim Lovino, “Jesus Missing From Obama’s Georgetown Speech,” NBC Washington, April 17, 2009.
4. Johanna Neuman, “Obama end Bush-era National Prayer Day Service at White House,” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 2009.
5. Chris McGreal, “Vatican vetoes Barack Obama’s nominees for U.S. Ambassador,” The Guardian, April 14, 2009.
6. Meredith Jessup, “Obama Continues to Omit ‘Creator’ From Declaration of Independence,” The Blaze, October 19, 2010.
7. “Remarks by the President at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, Indonesia,” The White House, November 10, 2010.
8. LadyImpactOhio, “ Feds sued by Veterans to allow stolen Mojave Desert Cross to be rebuilt,” Red State, January 14, 2011.
9. Marrianne Medlin, “Amid criticism, President Obama moves to fill vacant religious ambassador post,” Catholic News Agency, February 9, 2011; Thomas F. Farr, “Undefender of the Faith,” Foreign Policy, April 5, 2012.
10. Chris Johnson, “ENDA passage effort renewed with Senate introduction,” Washington Blade, April 15, 2011.
11. Chuck Donovan, “HHS’s New Health Guidelines Trample on Conscience,” Heritage Foundation, August 2, 2011.
12. Todd Starns, “Obama Administration Opposes FDR Prayer at WWII Memorial,” Fox News, November 4, 2011.
13. Joel Siegel, “Obama Omits God From Thanksgiving Speech, Riles Critics,” ABC News, November 25, 2011.
14. Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Remarks in Recognition of International Human Rights Day,” U.S. Department of State, December 6, 2011.
15. Ted Olson, “Church Wins Firing Case at Supreme Court,” Christianity Today, January 11, 2012.
16. Audrey Hudson, “Obama administration religious service for student loan forgiveness,” Human Events, February 15, 2012.
17. “Houston Veterans Claim Censorship of Prayers, Including Ban of ‘God’ and ‘Jesus’,” Fox News, June 29, 2011.
18. Jason Ukman, “Air Force suspends ethics course that used Bible passages that train missle launch officers,” Washington Post, August 2, 2011.
19. “Maintaining Government Neutrality Regarding Religion,” Department of the Air Force, September 1, 2011.
20. “Wounded, Ill, and Injured Partners in Care Guidelines,” Department of the Navy (accessed on February 29, 2012).
21. “Air Force Academy Backs Away from Christmas Charity,” Fox News Radio, November 4, 2011.
22. Jenny Dean, “Air Force Academy adapts to pagans, druids, witches and Wiccans,” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 2011.
23. Ken Blackwell, “Gen. Boykin Blocked At West Point,” cnsnews.com, February 1, 2012.
24. Geoff Herbert, ” Air Force unit removes ‘God’ from logo; lawmakers warn of ‘dangerous precedent’,” syracuse.com, February 9, 2012.
25. Todd Starnes, “Army Silences Catholic Chaplains,” Fox News Radio, February 6, 2012.
26. Jeff Mason and Deborah Charles, “Obama lifts restrictions on abortion funding,” Reuters, January 23, 2009.
27. “Obama pick: Taxpayers must fund abortions,” World Net Daily, January 27, 2009.
28. Steven Ertelt, “Pro-Life Groups Left Off Obama’s Health Care Summit List, Abortion Advocates OK,” LifeNews, March 5, 2009.
29. “ Obama Signs Order Lifting Restrictions on Stem Cell Research Funding,” Fox News, March 9, 2009.
30. Steven Ertelt, “ Obama Administration Announces $50 Million for Pro-Forced Abortion UNFPA,” LifeNews, March 26, 2009; Steven Ertelt, “President Barack Obama’s Pro-Abortion Record: A Pro-Life Compilation,” LifeNews, February 11, 2012.
31. Steven Ertelt, “Barack Obama’s Federal Budget Eliminates Funding for Abstinence-Only Education,” LifeNews, May 8, 2009.
32. Steven Ertelt, “Obama Budget Funds Sex Ed Over Abstinence on 16-1 Margin,” LifeNews, February 14, 2011.
33. Steven Ertelt, “Obama Admin Terrorism Dictionary Calls Pro-Life Advocates Violent, Racist,” LifeNews, May 5, 2009.
34. “Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies,” The White House, June 17, 2009.
35. Matt Cover, “Obama’s EEOC Nominee: Society Should ‘Not Tolerate Private Beliefs’ That ‘Adversely Affect’ Homosexuals,” cnsnews.com, January 18, 2010.
36. Tess Civantos, “White House Spent $23M of Taxpayer Money to Back Kenyan Constitution That Legalizes Abortion, GOP Reps Say,” Fox News, July 22, 2010.
37. Steven Ertelt, “Obama, Congress Cut Funding for 176 Abstinence Programs Despite New Study,” LifeNews, August 26, 2010.
38. Steven Ertelt, “President Barack Obama’s Pro-Abortion Record: A Pro-Life Compilation,” LifeNews, February 11, 2012.
39. Brian Montopoli, “Obama administration will no longer defend DOMA,” CBSNews, February 23, 2011.
40. Steven Ertelt, “Obama Admin Ignores Planned Parenthood Sex Trafficking Videos,” LifeNews, March 2, 2011.
41. Elisabeth Bumiller, “Obama Ends ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Policy,” New York Times, July 22, 2011; George Washington, The Writings of George Washington, John C. Fitzpatrick, editor (Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1934), Vol. XI, pp. 83-84, from General Orders at Valley Forge on March 14, 1778.
42. Luis Martinez, “Will Same Sex Marriages Pose a Dilemma for Military Chaplains?,” ABC News, October 12, 2011.
43. Jerry Markon, “Health, abortion issues split Obama administration and Catholic groups,” Washington Post, October 31, 2011.
44. Barack Obama, “ Remarks by the President at Iftar Dinner,” The White House, September 1, 2009; Kristi Keck, “ Obama tones down National Day of Prayer observance,” CNN, May 6, 2009; Dan Gilgoff, “ The White House on National Day of Prayer: A Proclamation, but No Formal Ceremony,” U.S. News, May 1, 2009.
45. “Franklin Graham Regrets Army’s Decision to Rescind Invite to Pentagon Prayer Service,” Fox News, April 22, 2010.
46. “Obama Bans Islam, Jihad From National Security Strategy Document,” Fox News, April 7, 2010; “Counterterror Adviser Defends Jihad as ‘Legitimate Tenet of Islam’,” Fox News, May 27, 2010; “‘Islamic Radicalism’ Nixed From Obama Document,” CBSNews, April 7, 2010.
47. Chuck Norris, “ President Obama: Muslim Missionary? (Part 2),” Townhall.com, August 24, 2010; Chuck Norris, “President Obama: Muslim Missionary?,” Townhall.com, August 17, 2010.
48. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at Iftar Dinner,” The White House, August 13, 2010; “Obama Comes Out in Favor of Allowing Mosque Near Ground Zero,” Fox News, August 13, 2010; Pamela Geller, “Islamic Supremacism Trumps Christianity at Ground Zero,” American Thinker, July 21, 2011.
49. “WH Fails to Release Easter Proclamation,” Fox Nation, April 25, 2011; “President Obama ignores most holy Christian holiday; AFA calls act intentional,” American Family Association (accessed on February 29, 2012).
50. “Report: Obama’s Muslim Advisers Block Middle Eastern Christians’ Access to the White House,” Big Peace (accessed on February 29, 2012).
51. Masoud Popalzai and Nick Paton Walsh, “ Obama apologizes to Afghanistan for Quran burning,” CNN, February 23, 2012; “USA/Afghanistan-Islamophobia: Pentagon official apologizes for Quran burning,” International Islamic News Agency (accessed on February 29, 2012).
52. “Military burns unsolicited Bibles sent to Afghanistan,” CNN, May 22, 2009.

Without Representation – We Need a Leader Rather Than a Politician

CftC — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 22:45:45 +0000

Without Representation

In multiple articles addressing the unaltered failure of members of Congress to uphold their oaths of office, The Committee for the Constitution outlined a series of definitive legislative agendas that if enacted would serve to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States“ and the Bill of Rights according to the expressed intention of “the supreme law of the land”. From states’ rights, judicial activism, to taxes and well beyond Congress has failed. Faced with the blatant violations of Constitutional intention by the executive branch to the extent that some would call them treason, the attack on America by “enemies foreign and domestic” is clearly upon us. With freedom and “justice for all” being trampled at every level of government, loyal citizens must no longer remain tolerant.

CftC

Audit of the Federal Reserve Reveals $16 Trillion in Secret Bailouts

The first ever GAO (Government Accountability Office) audit of the Federal Reserve since its inception in 1913 was carried out and released on July 21st, 2011 thanks to the Ron Paul – Alan Grayson Amendment to the Dodd – Frank bill passed in 2010. Senators Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) sponsored the amendment in the Senate where the scope and extent of the audit in the house bill (HR1207) was diminished so that a complete audit was not accomplished. Ben Bernanke (pictured to the right), Alan Greenspan, and various other bankers vehemently opposed the audit and lied to Congress about the effects an audit would have on markets.

What was revealed in the audit was startling:

$16,000,000,000,000.00 had been secretly doled out to failing or at risk U.S. banks and corporations and foreign banks in the period between December 2007 and June 2010 at 0% interest. Virtually none of the money embezzled from the American public has been repaid. These unelected unaccountable bureaucrats diverted these funds exceeding the national debt while Americans were struggling to find jobs.

Putting $16 trillion into perspective, the GDP of the United States is $14.12 trillion. Spanning its 200+ year history, the United States government only within the last few years just recently amassed a $14.5 trillion national debt. By presuming to pass this incomprehensible debt on to our children, the politicians and bureaucrats have violated the intention of the Constitution as clearly expressed in the Preamble. No rational person can suggest that passing such a burden on to others in any way “secure[s] the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”. Even the similarly unconstitutional unbalanced budget repeatedly debated beyond Constitutional bounds in Congress is but a fraction at $3.5 trillion. Yet, this de facto central or national bank which the Framers opposed and rejected was created by Congress in 1913 without any oversight or accountability. Moreover, it was again a failed Congress that passed the TARP bailout bill in late 2008 giving an additional $800 billion to many of these same failing banks and companies.

When a self proclaimed Democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders states “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.” , the “domestic enemies” in our midst are exposed and Congress is without excuse!. It is a transgression of the original intention of the Constitution that cannot and must not be ignored. All elected officials failing in their oath of office must be removed. Unelected bankers and bureaucrats creating money out of thin air by rolling the printing presses with government executive sanction plundering working Americans without justice obtaining are no better than King George or the British Parliament in 1776. We are in a new civil war fighting “enemies, foreign and domestic” so “that this Nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth”.

The list of institutions that received the most money from the Federal Reserve can be found on page 131 of the GAO Audit and are as follows..

Citigroup: $2.5 trillion ($2,500,000,000,000)
Morgan Stanley: $2.04 trillion ($2,040,000,000,000)
Merrill Lynch: $1.949 trillion ($1,949,000,000,000)
Bank of America: $1.344 trillion ($1,344,000,000,000)
Barclays PLC (United Kingdom): $868 billion ($868,000,000,000)
Bear Sterns: $853 billion ($853,000,000,000)
Goldman Sachs: $814 billion ($814,000,000,000)
Royal Bank of Scotland (UK): $541 billion ($541,000,000,000)
JP Morgan Chase: $391 billion ($391,000,000,000)
Deutsche Bank (Germany): $354 billion ($354,000,000,000)
UBS (Switzerland): $287 billion ($287,000,000,000)
Credit Suisse (Switzerland): $262 billion ($262,000,000,000)
Lehman Brothers: $183 billion ($183,000,000,000)
Bank of Scotland (United Kingdom): $181 billion ($181,000,000,000)
BNP Paribas (France): $175 billion ($175,000,000,000)
and many more U.S. and foreign banks

Source: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-696
FULL PDF on GAO server: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11696.pdf

View the 266-page GAO audit of the Federal Reserve(July 21st, 2011): http://www.scribd.com/doc/60553686/GAO-Fed-Investigation

We Need a Leader Rather Than a Politician

Political establishments from local to state to national always want the electorate to think that “experience” is important for public office. Indeed, even corporate boards of directors want shareholders to think that according to their biased incorrect definition of the word, “experience” is worth the unjust and undeserved compensation these ruling elite are willing to pay to members of their respective good ol’ boy clubs to get a crony with “experience” as corporate executive. Unfortunately, it is not about any unusual or advanced training, higher education, leadership, or any other just ability or capacity that those in positions to nominate candidates for political position are interested in. Those holding the reigns of political power in every political organization of every size and composition are solely focused on a perpetuation of the political power that sustains their own “special” economic interests. To these, the word means how that person has previously exemplified a continuation of an injustice that can best be likened to the rights of succession required in the monarchies that American colonists had sought refuge from.

The “father of our country”, our first president, George Washington most certainly had no previous experience in the many offices that he was the first to hold. Moreover, those various political positions were at the head of organizations with structures that were completely new and untried in history. This was a leader the likes of which we are now in dire need! Many biographers have unanimously extolled the attributes of this man to the extent that without his leadership it is almost certain there most certainly would not have been a United States of America. Whether as President of the Continental Congress, Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, President of the Constitutional Convention, our first President unanimously elected, and every office before, between, and after that he held, this was a standard to which all leaders must aspire.

CftC

Following is an article by Stephen McDowell that attempts to capture a greatness with which likely the world will never again be blessed.

In the Hands of “Providence”

George Washington is one of the most significant men in all of history. Regarding the direct advancement of civil and political liberty in the earth, he may well be the most significant champion in all history. Certainly he was the central figure of bringing a new era of liberty to the world in modern times.1 Abraham Lincoln observed: “Washington is the mightiest name of earth – long since mightiest in the cause of civil liberty, still mightiest in moral reformation. On that name no eulogy is expected. It cannot be. To add brightness to the sun or glory to the name of Washington is alike impossible. Let none attempt it.”2

Founding Father Fisher Ames said that Washington changed the standard of human greatness.3 One biographer wrote, “Washington was without an equal, was unquestionably the greatest man that the world has produced in the last one thousand years.”4 Thomas Paine observed: “By common consent, Washington is regarded as not merely the Hero of the American Revolution, but the World’s Apostle of Liberty.”5 A figure in history like Washington did not just arise by happenstance. It was the near unanimous consent of early Americans that Washington, like Esther of old, had “come to the kingdom for such a time as this.”

After Washington’s death hundreds of commemorative orations were given all over the United States. Nearly all of them declare that Washington was a gift of God to the American people and to all of mankind. Some mention this in passing, many with this as the dominant theme. Washington is called the Moses of the American people, the Joshua who led his people into the promised land, and the savior of his country.

In his sermon “On the Death of George Washington,” Rev. Jedidiah Morse concluded his comparison of Moses and Washington by saying: “Never, perhaps, were coincidences in character and fortune, between any two illustrious men who have lived, so numerous and so striking, as between Moses and Washington. … Both were born for great and similar achievements; to deliver, under the guidance of Providence, each the tribes of their respective countrymen, from the yoke of oppression, and to establish them, with the best form of government and the wisest code of laws, an independent and respectable nation.”6

General Morgan, who fought alongside Washington during the Revolutionary War, acknowledged that Washington was key for obtaining independence, relating that while there were many officers with great talents, he was “necessary, to guide, direct, and animate the whole, and it pleased Almighty God to send that one in the person of George Washington!”7

President Calvin Coolidge summed up Washington’s contribution to mankind, under the providence of God, in a speech to Congress: “Washington was the directing spirit without which there would have been no independence, no Union, no Constitution and no Republic. His ways were the ways of truth. His influence grows. In wisdom of action, in purity of character he stands alone. We cannot yet estimate him. We can only indicate our reverence for him and thank the Divine Providence which sent him to serve and inspire his fellow men.”8

Washington’s contribution to the birth of America and the advancement of liberty in the world is unsurpassed by any man. Without Washington, America would not have won the Revolution. He provided the leadership necessary to hold the troops together, even in the most difficult situations. As one contemporary observed, Washington was “that hero, who affected, with little bloodshed, the greatest revolution in history.”9 Due to Washington’s influence, America avoided a monarchy or military rule — he rebuffed an attempt to make him king; he thwarted a military coup; and he set an example of civilian rule by resigning as Commander-in-Chief. The Constitutional Convention would not have succeeded without Washington’s influence as president of that body. America may never have set into motion her constitutional form of government, with a limited role of the president, without his example, for the unanimously elected Washington modeled how the president was to govern. Washington also set the standard for American international relations in his Farewell Address.

There would be no America, the land of liberty, without Washington, the apostle of liberty. The unique freedom, justice, and virtue incorporated into the American Republic have in the last two centuries spread throughout the world and taken root in many nations. Hence, Washington’s legacy has impacted the world, and will continue to do so for centuries to come.

His greatness did not stem from oratorical skills or superior knowledge or brilliant military tactics, but rather from his strong virtues, sense of duty, and invincible resolution. When he was offered leadership of the army and leadership of the nation, he expressed doubts in his abilities to accomplish these tasks, but once he occupied those positions, nothing could stop him from performing his duty. By sheer force of character he held the disorganized nation together during the great struggle for independence, and after victory was won, the love of the people for him provided the unifying factor necessary to set a course for the American constitutional republic.

The providence of God and Washington’s Christian faith were key to his character, career, and accomplishments. His faith, heart, and humility are revealed in the “Circular to the Governors of the states” in 1783 when he prayed that God would protect them and “most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacific temper of mind, which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy nation.”10 In his famous “Oration on the Death of General Washington,” Gen. Henry Lee said that Washington was “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen. Vice shuddered in his presence, and virtue always felt his fostering hand; the purity of his private character gave effulgence to his public virtues.” Washington was first because, as Lee said, he was “the man designed by Heaven to lead in the great political, as well as military, events which have distinguished the area of his life. The finger of an overruling Providence pointing at Washington was neither mistaken nor unobserved.”11

Washington himself had a sense of how God used him providentially to advance the cause of liberty to mankind as well as an understanding of the providential purpose of America, writing in March 1785: “At best I have only been an instrument in the hands of Providence, to effect, with the aid of France and many virtuous fellow Citizens of America, a revolution which is interesting to the general liberties of mankind, and to the emancipation of a country which may afford an Asylum, if we are wise enough to pursue the paths [which] lead to virtue and happiness, to the oppressed and needy of the Earth.”12

America set in motion a new example of religious, civil, and economic liberty that the nations have attempted to embrace during the last two centuries. The advancement of liberty in the world is directly related to the establishment of liberty in America, which owes its beginnings in large part to George Washington. Paine’s epithet of “World’s Apostle of Liberty” is, therefore, most fitting. Americans and citizens of the world who value liberty must forever keep alive in their hearts this great man and seek to follow his example.
The article above is taken from Apostle of Liberty: The World-Changing Leadership of George Washington, Stephen McDowell. This book can be ordered from the Providence Foundation, www.providencefoundation.com or 434-978-4535.

Footnotes

1. Lucretia Perry Osborn, Washington Speaks for Himself (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927), xi.
2. Abraham Lincoln, Washington Temperance Society speech, Springfield, Illinois, February 22, 1842
3. Works of Fisher Ames, as published by Seth Ames (1854), edited and enlarged by W.B. Allen, vol.1 (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1983), 527.
4. William Wilbur, The Making of George Washington (DeLand, Florida: Patriotic Education, 1973).
5. “George Washington: Deist? Freemason? Christian?” by James Renwick Manship, in Providential Perspective, Vol. 15, No. 1, Feb. 2000, Charlottesville: Providence Foundation.
6. Jedidiah Morse, “A Prayer and Sermon, Delivered at Charlestown, December 31, 1799, On the Death of George Washington . . . With an Additional Sketch of His Life” (London: Printed by J. Bateson, 1800).
7. Recollections and Private Memoirs of the Life and Character of Washington by George Washington Parke Custis, Benson J. Lossing, editor, (Philadelphia: Englewood, 1859), 322.
8. Osborn, p. iv. A facsimile of the peroration of President Coolidge’s Address to the Sixty-ninth Congress, Second Session, on Washington’s Birthday, February 22, 1927.
9. Letter of Dr. Letsom of London to a friend in Boston, in E. C. M’Guire, The Religious Opinions and Character of Washington (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1836), 326.
10. Circular to the States, June 8, 1783, The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799, John C. Fitzpatrick, Editor (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1931), 26:496.
11. “Oration on the Death of General Washington, Pronounced before Both Houses of Congress, on December 16, 1799” by Major-General Henry Lee, in Custis, 622, 618-619.
12. Letter to Lucretia Wilhemina Van Winter, March 30, 1785, The Writings of George Washington, 28:120.

IN SICKENING CONTRAST!!!

Buffett’s Bank of America

Warren Buffett’s Net Worth Jumps $154M Thanks to Mortgage Settlement

BY: Patrick Howley – February 10, 2012

Warren Buffett’s stake in Bank of America Corp. increased in value by $154 million after President Obama and the U.S. Justice Department announced a $25 billion foreclosure abuse settlement with the five largest U.S. banks Thursday, records show.

Buffett invested $5 billion in Bank of America (BofA) on Aug. 25, 2011. As part of his investment deal, Buffett gained warrants that allow him to buy 700 million shares of Bank of America stock at a strike price of $7.14 a share. However, on Dec. 19, 2011, it was reported that Buffett was $1.5 billion underwater on his stock warrants, with shares of BofA stock trading at $4.94. But on Thursday, after President Obama personally announced the details of the settlement, BofA stock closed at $8.13 a share. The stock opened Friday morning at $8.31 and reached as high as $8.35 a share.

If Buffett had exercised his warrants Friday morning, he would have made $847 million. $154 million of that profit would have been related to the foreclosure deal.

This is not the first time Buffett has profited from Obama administration policies. In November 2011, it was reported that President Obama’s two-year postponement of the deadline to determine the future of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would force North Dakota oil producers to rely more heavily on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. holding company purchased the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad Corp. in a total package worth $44 billion in 2009.

Buffett has personally contributed $5,000 to Obama this election cycle, while Berkshire Hathaway has contributed $30,800 to the Democratic National Committee.

This summer, Obama will accept the Democratic Party’s 2012 presidential nomination with a speech at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C.

Krauthammer On Obama

CftC — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 07:58:01 +0000

Krauthammer On Obama

Obama offers a tripartite social democratic agenda: nationalized health care, federalized education (ultimately guaranteed through college) and a cash-cow carbon tax (or its equivalent) to subsidize the other two. Problem is, the math doesn’t add up.

The Obamaist Manifesto

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, February 27, 2009

Not a great speech, but extremely consequential. If Barack Obama succeeds, his joint address to Congress will be seen as historic — indeed as the foundational document of Obamaism. As it stands, it constitutes the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president.

The first part of the speech, justifying his economic stabilization efforts, was mere housekeeping. The economic crisis is to Obama a technocratic puzzle that needs to be solved because otherwise he loses all popular support.

Unlike most presidents, however, he doesn’t covet popular support for its own sake. Some men become president to be someone, others to do something. This is what separates, say, a Bill Clinton from a Ronald Reagan. Obama, who once noted that Reagan altered the trajectory of America as Clinton had not, sees himself a Reagan.

Reagan came to office to do something: shrink government, lower taxes, rebuild American defenses. Obama made clear Tuesday night that he intends to be equally transformative. His three goals: universal health care, universal education, and a new green energy economy highly funded and regulated by government.

(1) Obama wants to be to universal health care what Lyndon Johnson was to Medicare. Obama has publicly abandoned his once-stated preference for a single-payer system as in Canada and Britain. But that is for practical reasons. In America, you can’t get there from here directly.

Instead, Obama will create the middle step that will lead ultimately and inevitably to single-payer. The way to do it is to establish a reformed system that retains a private health-insurance sector but offers a new government-run plan (based on benefits open to members of Congress) so relatively attractive that people voluntarily move out of the private sector, thereby starving it. The ultimate result is a system of fully socialized medicine. This will probably not happen until long after Obama leaves office. But he will be rightly recognized as its father.

(2) Beyond cradle-to-grave health care, Obama wants cradle-to-cubicle education. He wants far more government grants, tax credits and other financial guarantees for college education — another way station to another universal federal entitlement. He lauded the country for establishing free high school education during the Industrial Revolution; he wants to put us on the road to doing the same for college during the Information Age.

(3) Obama wants to be to green energy what John Kennedy was to the moon shot, its visionary and creator. It starts with the establishment of a government-guided, government-funded green energy sector into which the administration will pour billions of dollars from the stimulus package and billions more from budgets to come.

But just picking winners and losers is hardly sufficient for a president who sees himself as world-historical. Hence the carbon cap-and-trade system he proposed Tuesday night that will massively restructure American industry and create a highly regulated energy sector.

These revolutions in health care, education and energy are not just abstract hopes. They have already taken life in Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, a huge expansion of social spending constituting a down payment on Obama’s plan for remaking the American social contract.

Obama sees the current economic crisis as an opportunity. He has said so openly. And now we know what opportunity he wants to seize. Just as the Depression created the political and psychological conditions for Franklin Roosevelt’s transformation of America from laissez-faireism to the beginnings of the welfare state, the current crisis gives Obama the political space to move the still (relatively) modest American welfare state toward European-style social democracy.

In the European Union, government spending has declined slightly, from 48 percent to 47 percent of GDP during the past 10 years. In the United States, it has shot up from 34 percent to 40 percent. Part of this explosive growth in U.S. government spending reflects the emergency private-sector interventions of a Republican administration. But the clear intent was to make the massive intrusion into the private sector temporary and to retreat as quickly as possible. Obama has radically different ambitions.

The spread between Europe and America in government-controlled GDP has already shrunk from 14 percent to 7 percent. Two terms of Obamaism and the difference will be zero.

Conservatives take a dim view of the regulation-bound, economically sclerotic, socially stagnant, nanny state that is the European Union. Nonetheless, Obama is ascendant and has the personal mandate to take the country where he wishes. He has laid out boldly the Brussels-bound path he wants to take.

Let the debate begin.

____________________________________

Obama’s Radical Agenda

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, March 6, 2009

Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the “2 trillion dollars in savings” that “we have already identified,” $1.6 trillion of which President Obama’s budget director later admits is the “savings” of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 — 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama’s tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that’s a matter of scale, not principle.

All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama’s radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.

The logic of Obama’s address to Congress went like this:

“Our economy did not fall into decline overnight,” he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care and education — importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The “day of reckoning” has arrived. And because “it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament,” Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the banking industry. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan’s Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful home buyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing-in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What’s going on? “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” said chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. “This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”

Things. Now we know what they are. The markets’ recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions — the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic — for enacting his “Big Bang” agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy — worthy and weighty as they may be — are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

____________________________________

Obama’s Ultimate Agenda

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, March 6, 2009

Five minutes of explanation to James Madison, and he’ll have a pretty good idea what a motorcar is (basically a steamboat on wheels; the internal combustion engine might take a few minutes more). Then try to explain to Madison how the Constitution he fathered allows the president to unilaterally guarantee the repair or replacement of every component of millions of such contraptions sold in the several states, and you will leave him slack-jawed.

In fact, we are now so deep into government intervention that constitutional objections are summarily swept aside. The last Treasury secretary brought the nine largest banks into his office and informed them that henceforth he was their partner. His successor is seeking the power to seize any financial institution at his own discretion.

Despite these astonishments, I remain more amused than alarmed. First, the notion of presidential car warranties strikes me as simply too bizarre, too comical, to mark the beginning of Yankee Peronism.

Second, there is every political incentive to make these interventions in the banks and autos temporary and circumscribed. For President Obama, autos and banks are sideshows. Enormous sideshows, to be sure, but had the financial meltdown and the looming auto bankruptcies not been handed to him, he would hardly have gone seeking to be the nation’s credit and car czar.

Obama has far different ambitions. His goal is to rewrite the American social compact, to recast the relationship between government and citizen. He wants government to narrow the nation’s income and anxiety gaps. Soak the rich for reasons of revenue and justice. Nationalize health care and federalize education to grant all citizens of all classes the freedom from anxiety about health care and college that the rich enjoy. And fund this vast new social safety net through the cash cow of a disguised carbon tax.

Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.

Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism. (Asked by Charlie Gibson during a campaign debate about his support for raising capital gains taxes — even if they caused a net revenue loss to the government — Obama stuck to the tax hike “for purposes of fairness.”) The elements are highly progressive taxation, federalized health care and higher education, and revenue-producing energy controls. But first he must deal with the sideshows. They could sink the economy and poison his public support before he gets to enact his real agenda.

The big sideshows, of course, are the credit crisis, which Obama has contracted out to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and the collapse of the U.S. automakers, which Obama seems to have taken on for himself.

That was a tactical mistake. Better to have let the car companies go directly to Chapter 11 and have a judge mete out the bitter medicine to the workers and bondholders.

By sacking GM’s CEO, packing the new board, and giving direction as to which brands to drop and what kind of cars to make, Obama takes ownership of General Motors. He may soon come to regret it. He has now gotten himself so entangled in the car business that he is personally guaranteeing your muffler. (Upon reflection, a job best left to the congenitally unmuffled Joe Biden.)

Some find in this descent into large-scale industrial policy a whiff of 1930s-style fascist corporatism. I have my doubts. These interventions are rather targeted. They involve global financial institutions that even the Bush administration decided had to be nationalized and auto companies that themselves came begging to the government for money.

Bizarre and constitutionally suspect as these interventions may be, the transformation of the American system will come from elsewhere. The credit crisis will pass and the auto overcapacity will sort itself out one way or the other. The reordering of the American system will come not from these temporary interventions, into which Obama has reluctantly waded. It will come from Obama’s real agenda: his holy trinity of health care, education and energy. Out of these will come a radical extension of the welfare state; social and economic leveling in the name of fairness; and a massive increase in the size, scope and reach of government.

If Obama has his way, the change that is coming is a new America: “fair,” leveled and social democratic. Obama didn’t get elected to warranty your muffler. He’s here to warranty your life.

____________________________________

Barack Obama’s ‘New Foundation’ – a Sting in Four Parts

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, April 17, 2009

Franklin Roosevelt gave us the New Deal. John Kennedy gave us the New Frontier. In a major domestic policy address at Georgetown University this week, Barack Obama promised — eight times — a “New Foundation.” For those too thick to have noticed this proclamation of a new era in American history, the White House Web site helpfully titled its speech excerpts “A New Foundation.”

As it happens, Obama is not the first to try this slogan. President Jimmy Carter peppered his 1979 State of the Union address with five “New Foundations” (and eight more just naked “foundations”). Like most of Carter’s endeavors, this one failed, perhaps because (as I recall it being said at the time) it sounded like the introduction of a new kind of undergarment.

Undaunted, Obama offered his New Foundation speech as the complete, contextual, canonical text for the domestic revolution he aims to enact. It had everything we have come to expect from Obama:

The Whopper: The boast that he had “identified $2 trillion in deficit reductions over the next decade.” It takes audacity to repeat this after it had been so widely exposed as transparently phony. Most of this $2 trillion is conjured up by refraining from spending $180 billion a year for 10 more years of surges in Iraq. Hell, why not make the “deficit reductions” $10 trillion — the extra $8 trillion coming from refraining from repeating the $787 billion stimulus package annually through 2019.

The Puzzler: He further boasted of his frugality by saying that his budget would reduce domestic discretionary spending as a share of GDP to the lowest level ever recorded. Amazing. Squeezing discretionary domestic spending at a time of hugely expanding budgets is merely the baleful residue of out-of-control entitlements and debt service, which will increase astronomically under Obama. To claim these as achievements in fiscal responsibility is testament not to Obama’s frugality but to his brazenness.

The Non Sequitur: “To make sure such a crisis [as we have today] never happens again,” Obama proposes his radical health-care, energy and education reforms, the central pillars of his social democratic agenda. But Obama’s own words contradict this assertion. Notes The Post: “But as his admirable summation of recent history made clear, these pursuits have little to do with the economic crisis, and they are not the key to economic recovery.” Obama rarely fails to repeat this false connection. A crisis — and the public’s resulting pliability to liberal social engineering — is a terrible thing to waste.

The Swindle: The Obama administration is spending money like none other in peacetime history. Obama is smart. He knows this is fiscally unsustainable. He has let it be known privately and publicly that he intends to cure the imbalance with entitlement reform.

An excellent strategy. If it takes throwing nearly $1 trillion of “porky” (to quote Sen. Charles Schumer) stimulus spending to soften up a Democratic Congress and make it amenable to real entitlement reform, then fine. Reforming Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would save tens of trillions of dollars, and make the current money-from-helicopters spending almost trivial by comparison.

In the New Foundation speech, Obama correctly (again) identifies the skyrocketing cost of Medicare and Medicaid as the key fiscal problem. But then he claims that Medicaid and Medicare reform is the same as his health-care reform, fatuously citing as his authority a one-day meeting of handpicked interested parties at his “Fiscal Responsibility Summit.”

Here’s the problem. The heart of Obama’s health-care reform is universality. Covering more people costs more money. That is why Obama’s budget sets aside an extra $634 billion in health-care spending, a down payment on an estimated additional spending of $1 trillion. How does the administration curtail the Medicare and Medicaid entitlement by adding yet another (now universal) health-care entitlement that its own estimate acknowledges increases costs by about $1 trillion?

Which is why in his March 24 news conference, Obama could not explain how — when the near-term stimulative spending is over and his ambitious domestic priorities kick in, promising sustained prosperity and deficit reduction — the deficits at the end of the coming decade are rising, not falling. The Congressional Budget Office has deficits increasing in the last seven years of the decade from an already unsustainable $672 billion annually to $1.2 trillion by 2019.

This is the sand on which the new foundation is constructed. Obama has the magic to make words mean almost anything. Numbers are more resistant to his charms.

____________________________________

Obama: The Grand Strategy

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, April 24, 2009

Unified theory of Obamaism, fifth (final?) installment:

In the service of his ultimate mission — the leveling of social inequalities — President Obama offers a tripartite social democratic agenda: nationalized health care, federalized education (ultimately guaranteed through college) and a cash-cow carbon tax (or its equivalent) to subsidize the other two.

Problem is, the math doesn’t add up. Not even a carbon tax would pay for Obama’s vastly expanded welfare state. Nor will Midwest Democrats stand for a tax that would devastate their already crumbling region.

What is obviously required is entitlement reform, meaning Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. That’s where the real money is — trillions saved that could not only fund hugely expensive health and education programs but also restore budgetary balance.

Except that Obama has offered no real entitlement reform. His universal health-care proposal would increase costs by perhaps $1 trillion. Medicare/Medicaid reform is supposed to decrease costs.

Obama’s own budget projections show staggering budget deficits going out to 2019. If he knows his social agenda is going to drown us in debt, what’s he up to?

He has an idea. But he dare not speak of it yet. He has only hinted. When asked in his March 24 news conference about the huge debt he’s incurring, Obama spoke vaguely of “additional adjustments” that will be unfolding in future budgets.

Rarely have two more anodyne words carried such import. “Additional adjustments” equals major cuts in Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.

Social Security is relatively easy. A bipartisan commission (like the 1983 Alan Greenspan commission) recommends some combination of means testing for richer people, increasing the retirement age and a technical change in the inflation measure (indexing benefits to prices instead of wages). The proposal is brought to Congress for a no-amendment up-or-down vote. Done.

The hard part is Medicare and Medicaid. In an aging population, how do you keep them from blowing up the budget? There is only one answer: rationing.

Why do you think the stimulus package pours $1.1 billion into medical “comparative effectiveness research”? It is the perfect setup for rationing. Once you establish what is “best practice” for expensive operations, medical tests and aggressive therapies, you’ve laid the premise for funding some and denying others.

It is estimated that a third to a half of one’s lifetime health costs are consumed in the last six months of life. Accordingly, Britain’s National Health Service can deny treatments it deems not cost-effective — and if you’re old and infirm, the cost-effectiveness of treating you plummets. In Canada, they ration by queuing. You can wait forever for so-called elective procedures like hip replacements.

Rationing is not quite as alien to America as we think. We already ration kidneys and hearts for transplant according to survivability criteria as well as by queuing. A nationalized health insurance system would ration everything from MRIs to intensive care by myriad similar criteria.

The more acute thinkers on the left can see rationing coming, provoking Slate blogger Mickey Kaus to warn of the political danger. “Isn’t it an epic mistake to try to sell Democratic health care reform on this basis? Possible sales pitch: ‘Our plan will deny you unnecessary treatments!’ . . . Is that really why the middle class will sign on to a revolutionary multitrillion-dollar shift in spending — so the government can decide their life or health ‘is not worth the price’?”

My own preference is for a highly competitive, privatized health insurance system with a government-subsidized transition to portability, breaking the absurd and ruinous link between health insurance and employment. But if you believe that health care is a public good to be guaranteed by the state, then a single-payer system is the next best alternative. Unfortunately, it is fiscally unsustainable without rationing.

Social Security used to be the third rail of American politics. Not anymore. Health-care rationing is taking its place — which is why Obama, the consummate politician, knows to offer the candy (universality) today before serving the spinach (rationing) tomorrow.

Taken as a whole, Obama’s social democratic agenda is breathtaking. And the rollout has thus far been brilliant. It follows Kaus’s advice to “give pandering a chance” and adheres to the Democratic tradition of being the party that gives things away, while leaving the green-eyeshade stinginess to those heartless Republicans.

It will work for a while, but there is no escaping rationing. In the end, the spinach must be served.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

The Coming Higher-Ed Revolution

CftC — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 00:06:38 +0000

The Coming Higher-Ed Revolution

By Stuart Butler, Ph.D.
January 13, 2012

(This article was published by National Affairs and can be found at this link:
The Coming Higher-Ed Revolution, National Affairs, Issue Number 10, Winter 2012)

In recent decades, key sectors of the American economy have experienced huge and disruptive transformations—shifts that have ultimately yielded beneficial changes to the way producers and customers do business together. From the deregulation that brought about the end of AT&T’s “Ma Bell” system, to the way entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs forever changed the computer world once dominated by IBM, to the way the internet and bloggers have upended the business model of traditional newspapers, we have seen industries completely remade—often in wholly unexpected ways. In hindsight, such transformations seem to have been inevitable; at the time, however, most leaders in these fields never saw the changes coming.

The higher-education industry is on the verge of such a transformative re-alignment. Many Americans agree that a four-year degree is vastly overpriced—keeping many people out of the market—and are increasingly questioning the value of what many colleges teach. Nevertheless, for those who seek a certain level of economic security or advancement, a four-year degree is absolutely necessary. Clearly, this is a situation primed for change. In as little as a decade, most colleges and universities could look very different from their present forms—with the cost of a college credential plummeting even as the quality of instruction rises.

If this transformation does come to pass, it could have profound and beneficial implications. It could significantly increase the international competitiveness of American workers in a world in which we need higher skills and productivity to compete. It could sharply improve the employability of those on the bottom rungs of America’s income ladder, giving them the tools they need to move up. And it could do much to restore the American Dream for those who have begun to believe that opportunity in this country is disappearing. In other words, such a change could hardly come too soon.

The Necessary Credential

A transformation in higher education is likely to be driven by a few key factors that, in combination, pose a serious threat to the industry’s status quo. Of these, perhaps the most urgent are the increasing importance of higher education and its increasing expense. Today, most Americans realize that a college degree is essential to upward economic mobility—and yet many are simply unable to obtain one. This glut of demand, set against a shortage of suitable and affordable supply, is bound to lead to serious change.

Americans’ concerns are certainly reinforced by the data. A review of the research on economic mobility indicates that education is the largest factor in explaining the connection between parents’ earnings and the lifetime earnings of their children. Put another way, the lack of adequate education is a daunting obstacle to an individual’s future economic success.

In some ways, this situation is hardly new: Completing a certain level of education has long been crucial to securing good employment. The difference is that, just a generation ago, the attainment level needed to assure a reasonable chance at the American Dream was a high-school diploma. And with our system of public K-12 education, that key credential was within reach for almost anyone who wanted to obtain it.

Today, however, the high-school diploma has been supplanted by the college degree; making it through four years of college is now virtually a prerequisite for economic advancement.[1] Indeed, Census Bureau data show that an American with a bachelor’s degree will earn, on average, about 70% more each year than one with only a high-school diploma. The income advantage offered by a college degree is nearly double what it was just a generation ago. And it is the full bachelor’s degree that counts: Even someone with a two-year associate degree can expect just 29% more in annual income than a person who holds only a high-school diploma.[2]

Thus an American from a modest-income household who stays in school and obtains a college degree has an excellent chance of reaching the middle and even higher rungs of the economic ladder, as will his or her children. But an American from a similarly modest background who fails to obtain a college degree is likely to remain stuck at the bottom. And this alarming opportunity gap is widened by graduation rates: For the children of low-income families, college-graduation rates are much lower, and the economic consequences more significant, than they are for wealthier students. In fact, students from families in the bottom quartile of household income are now graduating from college at the lowest level in 30 years, with fewer than 10% obtaining a degree.

As for the perceived accessibility of a college degree, it is true that total enrollment is rising. Relative to other countries, however, America’s graduation rate has slipped sharply. According to a 2010 College Board report examining data from 2007, the United States—once the world’s leader in college-graduation rates among young adults—is failing to keep pace in educating rising generations of workers. Among citizens aged 55 to 65, the U.S. ranks fourth in the world, with 38.5% holding an associate degree or higher. But as these Americans retire, they will be replaced by a generation only slightly better educated: Today, among citizens between the ages of 25 and 34, only 40.4% of Americans hold an associate degree or higher. That number drops our graduation rank to 12^th, putting the United States behind Canada, Korea, Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Israel, France, Belgium, and Australia.[3]

Why do so many Americans fail to attend or complete college even though it is critical to their long-term economic well-being? According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, the primary reason is financial, exacerbated by the perception that a degree is not worth the cost. In the survey, 57% of adults (18 and older) said that the higher-education system fails to provide good value for money, and 75% said it is unaffordable. Two-thirds of young adults (18-34) said that they could not attend college because they need to support a family.[4]

Moreover, 2011 surveys of graduates by Adecco, the work-force recruiting company, indicate that almost one-fifth of recent graduates have been forced to turn to full-time work outside their fields of study, often in jobs for which a college degree is not required. More than half of recent graduates have not been able to find full-time jobs in their chosen professions.[5]

Higher-education suppliers thus face an enormous untapped market: those demanding an affordable path to a qualification that is essential to moving up the economic ladder. The challenge is to respond to this demand in a form and at a cost that fit the lifestyles and pocketbooks of young people and their families. Such a cost reduction will require fundamental changes in the business model and pricing of higher education—changes that do not appear to be priorities for the industry’s established providers.

The Financing Fiasco

Yet even as college leaders seem unwilling to reverse the current trends of rising tuition and growing student indebtedness, serious alternatives to the status quo are beginning to emerge. The existence of this competition, combined with widespread public frustration, has produced the conditions that may allow for a sweeping makeover of American higher education.

The chief catalyst for this transformation will be money. The financing vision of traditional higher education, which assumes steadily rising tuition and heavily indebted graduates, is increasingly at odds with the financial capacities of typical households. Just when the need for a college education is becoming more obvious, the cost obstacle is growing dramatically. Something has to give.

Over the past 25 years, the cost of a college education, adjusted for inflation, has almost trebled, while inflation-adjusted median family income has risen by only about 10%. The cost of college has thus climbed steadily as a percentage of family income, especially for four-year private colleges. According to the College Board, over the past ten years, in-state tuition and fees have been rising (in inflation-adjusted terms) at 5.6% annually for four-year public colleges and almost 3% for private non-profits. In 2011, in the midst of the Great Recession and an avalanche of home foreclosures and persistently high unemployment, tuition and fees soared 8.3% at public universities and 4.5% at private universities. The average annual published figure for in-state tuition, fees, room and board, and other expenses now exceeds $17,000 ($29,000 for out-of-state students) at four-year public colleges, and tops $38,000 at private non-profits.[6]

At these rates, it is hardly surprising that families face sticker shock. And in a sign of possible developments to come, the burgeoning expenses in higher education bear a close resemblance to the growing costs of health-care coverage. Like higher education, health insurance is a large family budget item that has long been increasing much faster than underlying inflation. When those growing insurance costs reached a tipping point in the early 1980s, a strong consumer reaction—led by employers who had to foot most of the bill for increased premiums—triggered years of turbulence and government interference in the health-care market. There is little reason to believe that the higher-education sector will avoid a similar fate.

Even so, as often happens when an industry edges toward a pricing tipping point, university leaders seem oblivious. They appear to believe that their own cost increases can be addressed by hiking tuition rather than by restructuring to drive those costs down. The problem, however, is that such tuition increases raise the prospect of a more daunting student-debt burden—the other side of the financing conundrum.

According to the College Board, by 2009, 55% of graduating bachelor’s-degree students at public colleges were in debt, with an average indebtedness of $19,800. Among private non-profit college graduates, 65% were in debt, up from 63% in 2000, with an average loan burden of $26,100 (up from $22,300 in 2000, in 2009 dollars). Among all 2009 graduates with outstanding loans, the average debt burden totaled $24,000.[7] And for those students who fail to graduate, the burden of debt can be truly devastating: Of every 100 high schoolers today, just 50 will graduate and go to college, and only 30 will actually complete college. Many of the others will rack up enormous debts without securing the credential they need to pay down those obligations.

Looking ahead, the college prospects of less affluent Americans are likely to become much bleaker if the system does not go through some significant change. Last year, total student-loan debt surpassed credit-card debt in America—a chilling milestone—and it is likely to exceed $1 trillion next year. Moreover, as that debt burden grows, it is becoming more difficult for borrowers to keep up: According to the U.S. Department of Education, swelling student debt (exacerbated by the economic downturn) has produced an increase in the student-loan default rate—from 6.5% in 2003 to 11.2% this summer.

Another reason for rising student debt is diminishing support from parents. According to surveys by Sallie Mae, the largest financial-services company specializing in education, student and parental borrowing covers an average of 22% of a student’s college costs, compared with 30% from parental income and savings. But for less affluent families, recent economic developments—such as the erosion of stock values—have left parents increasingly unable to help pay college bills through borrowing or drawing down wealth.[8] This is particularly true of minority families: A recent study by the Pew Research Center shows that, while median net worth for white households fell by 16% between 2005 and 2009, the (already much lower) net worth of black households fell by 53%. For Hispanics, it declined by an even sharper 66%.

The Pew study found that the largest factor in this decline was plummeting housing prices. Black and Hispanic Americans have a disproportionate amount of their wealth in their homes; the collapse of the housing market has therefore meant a sharp reduction in equity that can be cashed out or used as collateral.[9] Research has shown a close correlation between home equity and the decision to attend college: Michael Lovenheim of Cornell has found that, between 2000 and 2005, a 1% increase in home prices led to a 0.13% increase in total enrollment at public colleges. A $10,000 change in home equity, he found, affected the likelihood of college attendance by 0.71%. The decision to go to a two-year college was especially sensitive to fluctuations in home equity: A 1% rise in equity, Lovenheim showed, drove up two-year college enrollment by 0.23%, but increased enrollment at four-year public colleges by just 0.08%.[10] Similarly, a decline in a family’s home equity reduced the probability of a child’s attending college. The sharp reduction in housing prices and home equity since 2008, to the tune of trillions of dollars nationwide, has thus significantly reduced the capacity of families—particularly those families that are most dependent on home equity for their wealth—to financially support their children who are contemplating college.

Cost is also a significant factor in the decision to drop out of college. According to a 2010 survey of students by Public Agenda, among those students who failed to graduate, 31% said a major reason for dropping out was that they could not afford the tuition and fees, with another 21% saying that cost was a minor reason. Of all the students not completing school, 54% said a major reason was that they needed to go to work and earn some money.[11] For others, of course, the rising financial bar has prevented them from contemplating a four-year college at all, or has required them to take an alternative route—such as attending a community college, either as a final credential or as a less expensive way to get two years of education en route to a four-year degree.

The relentless rise in college costs, together with the growth of indebtedness and the erosion of household wealth, is effectively splitting high-school and college-age Americans into two groups: those who can afford to attend and complete college and those who can’t. For the first group, generally from households that are well off, college is expensive but deemed to be worthwhile. In fact, among these students, satisfaction with the higher-education system has actually been rising, with an increased number holding the view that higher education is a good value for the money and that financial aid is adequate.[12] But for the second group—young Americans generally from less affluent households—the financial obstacles to completing college are daunting, if not insurmountable, and likely to grow worse in the years ahead.

With upward mobility in America so dependent on a degree, this means that poor students’ ability to move up the economic ladder will decline relative to that of young Americans whose families have already achieved the American Dream. The result will be an effective economic-mobility caste system. And in our society—which so prizes equality of opportunity—it seems unlikely that such a divide will be allowed to stand.

A New Way of Doing Business

Adding to the pressure is the third, and likely most decisive, threat to the current structure of higher education—namely, that its traditional business model is coming under attack from new kinds of institutions. The timing is right: In U.S. News & World Report’s 2010 college rankings, editor Brian Kelly wrote that the existing structure invites aggressive new forms of competition. “If colleges were businesses, they would be ripe for hostile takeovers, complete with serious cost-cutting and painful reorganizations,” Kelly observed. “You can be sure those business analysts would ask: Is the consumer getting the product we promised? What do you actually learn here? Can you guarantee a job? Admission to graduate school?”[13]

In truth, a takeover scenario is less likely than an end run—in which new technological developments, and new educational institutions with very different business models, circumvent higher education’s established players. Today, competitors are exploring markets that are ill-served by the traditional model, such as working Americans who want to enhance their skills and lower-income potential students looking for much cheaper degrees. Meanwhile, rapid change in information technology is giving creative new entrants a growing technological edge—an essential precondition for transformative change.

The most obvious technological threat to the comfortable world of higher education is online education. Online learning changes the entire relationship between student and teacher; it enables information to be transferred, and student performance to be monitored, at a fraction of conventional costs. Often called “distance learning,” online education has the potential to completely upend today’s established universities.

The concept of distance learning actually has a long history. The business model was pioneered in 1858 by Britain’s London University, which established an “External System” through which students around the world could obtain degrees through a correspondence courses. London boasts five Nobel laureates among its external graduates, and in 2008 its updated system had 41,000 students around the world. In 1969, the British government ushered in another distance-learning innovation when it chartered a television-based university—the Open University—aimed primarily at employed people who had never acquired a degree. Since then, 1.6 million people have studied at the university, with 250,000 students currently enrolled in the United Kingdom and around the world. In fact, the Open University is the largest producer of law graduates in the U.K., and is among the top three universities for student satisfaction, tied with Oxford.

These creative ventures did not lead to fundamental changes in the general higher-education landscape. But the rise of online learning—now also utilized by London and the Open University, among many other institutions—is likely to be the technological advance that triggers a broad transformation.

The main reason is that online education is growing rapidly in both scale and scope. For the past seven years, online enrollments in the United States have increased much faster than overall university enrollments. According to a survey of more than 2,500 colleges and universities by the Babson Survey Research Group, the proportion of students taking at least one online course grew from 10% in 2003 to 25% in 2008. And that figure continues to rise: In the fall semester of 2009, the share of students taking at least one online course was up 21.1% from the previous year and represented 29.3% of total enrollment—an enormous figure when compared to the increase in total post-secondary enrollment, which grew at just 1.2%.[14]

The appeal of online education, and the nature of its threat to traditional universities, are not hard to fathom. Online education allows students, such as those working while studying, to learn from their own homes at times of their choosing. It permits far greater flexibility, so that students do not have to follow the traditional semester structure and can learn at their own paces. For an increasing number of today’s students, whose K-12 educations and social lives have been built around technology, computer-based learning is more natural than the traditional “sage on a stage” model. And the quality of online education improves all the time: Babson reports that two-thirds of college and university administrators at public institutions now view online instruction as equal to or better than face-to-face instruction.

Accompanying this steady improvement have been important bursts of innovation. One example is the Khan Academy, a free, non-profit service that now provides more than 2,700 lectures online via YouTube, mainly in the sciences and primarily at the pre-college level.[15] The service started when a Bengali-American hedge-fund analyst, Salman Khan, began tutoring his cousin in mathematics and decided that YouTube was the best platform to use. Because YouTube allows anyone on the web to access Khan’s engaging lectures, they have become an international phenomenon, and are now widely used in schools. With funding from the Gates Foundation and others, the volume and breadth of the lectures have increased dramatically. Even more important, the Khan Academy now offers a sophisticated learning strategy that allows students to take graded tests and obtain feedback that steers them in a customized way toward appropriate material. Moreover, Khan can now provide a detailed education record based on a student’s use of the site, such that teachers can tailor their assistance to that student’s particular needs.

The Khan Academy is just one example of the creative use of online instruction and monitoring software that is transforming education and providing better quality at a fraction of the cost. And yet, despite the proliferation of such competitors, the major universities have been complacent in their responses to the challenge of online education. Their reaction has been simply to try to incorporate web-based learning into their traditional business model, rather than to treat it as a fundamentally different approach to learning. Most see online classes as merely a profitable not-for-credit extension of the university, designed for non-students to improve their general knowledge. Others see online education as a way of providing niche courses for credit to supplement the classes taught by full-time faculty—essentially a web-based version of the low-paid adjunct professor.

But like the early response of newspapers to internet technology, universities have generally kept charging their regular students high prices for access to online courses in order to protect the pricing of their standard on-campus classes. Harvard, for instance, operates an impressive extension school, offering a wide range of courses for either personal enrichment or degree credit. But it charges different prices according to the course viewer’s status, in order to avoid creating an incentive for students to pass over on-campus programs in favor of online instruction. And a colleague of mine who took a Yale master’s degree in nursing almost entirely online (while working at a hospital in Texas) observes wryly that the only discount she received off the regular campus-based course was that Yale waived the fee for a parking pass in New Haven.

To be sure, the established universities recognize that they face an unwelcome threat from for-profit schools that aim primarily at working students seeking professional qualifications. These include such competing institutions as the University of Phoenix, which blends online learning with instruction at local campuses across the country, and Kaplan University, owned by a subsidiary of the Washington Post. But because older working students have not been the primary market for traditional four-year universities, the established institutions have not viewed these alternatives as serious competition. Part of their confidence stems from the fact that these for-profits can be relatively expensive: Indeed, Phoenix and others have been criticized for supposedly understating their total costs and leaving many students with heavy debts. Furthermore, the traditional universities believe they have a decisive edge in quality and brand image, often sneering at the accelerated degree courses offered by the for-profits. (Of course, this dismissive reaction is eerily reminiscent of the attitude that major newspapers had during the early days of online news, when now-defunct publications believed that their journalistic quality and name brands would protect them from any serious competition.)

But while the emergence of online instruction is sure to drive change in higher education, it is not the whole story. The larger threat to the traditional university system seems more likely to come from institutions that combine online education with new, innovative business models. It is worth remembering that Apple’s Macintosh was not the first personal computer: Rather, it was Steve Jobs’s transformation of the interaction between user and machine that revolutionized the industry.

Similar potential exists in higher education, where the development of several intriguing new business models holds out the promise of radical change. For example, Harvard business expert Clayton Christensen points to Western Governors University, a non-profit created in 1996 by the governors of 19 western states.[16] WGU not only uses online education but also eschews curricula and grades. Instead, it identifies the core knowledge needed for competency in a subject area and tests for that knowledge, licensing the necessary study material. Members of WGU’s faculty function as mentors and tutors, assisting students with the material, rather than as formal instructors. WGU has won accreditation, and with its focus on undergraduates and master’s students (rather than Ph.D. students or research programs), the university now has more than 20,000 students nationwide. Perhaps most noteworthy, its annual tuition is below $6,000.

Brigham Young University-Idaho is another intriguing innovation. Created out of Ricks College in 2000, BYU-Idaho does not have a long summer recess or competitive athletics. It supplements regular professors with peer-to-peer instruction. For some students, the school allows technical certifications in core courses before moving on to electives, which means that students acquire official qualifications as they advance toward a bachelor’s degree. If, for any reason, the students do not graduate with a degree, they still have the certifications—unlike many students elsewhere, who may drop out of college with a large debt but no formal qualification of any kind. In some BYU-Idaho programs, students who can avoid room and board costs by living at home are able to complete a four-year degree for less than $8,000.[17]

The small, private Southern New Hampshire University is yet another example. Now the second-largest online-education provider in New England, SNHU’s 7,000 web-based students outnumber the on-campus student body. At the university, “course authors” with a strong understanding of online education develop classes but don’t necessarily teach them; often, the teachers are adjuncts who use the course authors’ materials. Next year, SNHU expects online education to bring in more than $100 million—a windfall that subsidizes the money-losing undergraduate campus. In a sharp break with most established universities, SNHU views online courses not as a sideshow to its traditional on-campus programs, but rather as the key to its future.

These innovative ventures have a great deal of potential, assuming they can clear a few critical hurdles. One is the perception that online or distance learning cannot provide the experiential benefits—especially the development of close personal relationships—offered by a traditional campus. As it happens, however, the traditional university’s supposed edge in providing face-to-face mentoring and instruction is already rapidly eroding. With advances in meeting software, the experience of a video tutorial is getting close to the “real thing.” Moreover, improvements in customized and sophisticated student-education data, such as those being developed by Khan Academy, make it easy to imagine the interaction quality of online tutorials surpassing the effectiveness of the traditional system. Today, it is remarkable if a professor (or, more likely, a teaching assistant) in class knows each student’s name. But in an online world, it is entirely conceivable that, during an online tutorial with a small group of students, the professor will be able to bring up a student’s performance data on-screen, much as a batter’s performance information is displayed in a ballpark as he comes up to the plate. With information about every student’s strengths and weaknesses, the professor can adapt each tutorial to make it far more useful to each individual student—providing a much more personalized educational experience than can be obtained on most campuses today.

Traditional universities are even losing their edge when it comes to forming the networks and lifelong friendships that used to be a hallmark of the campus experience. True, probably nothing will take the place of being a member of Skull and Bones, but for most young people today, electronic friendships and networks are the norm. In any case, $120,000 over four years seems a steep price to pay for making friends. Moreover, to the extent that an on-campus experience has a unique value, a blended on-campus and online experience may be sufficient for most students—especially if the total cost of such a degree is a fraction of the price of full-time attendance at a traditional university. The Open University in Britain has provided this sort of blended arrangement since its inception, with students typically attending on-campus courses for only a few weeks each year. It is even possible to imagine consortia of “virtual universities” organizing intramural and intercollegiate sports in home cities rather than on campuses.

Of course, the most obvious hurdle facing upstarts is the assurance of quality. Accreditation is not a serious problem for a new college with a different business model; unlike, say, the medical and legal professions, there is no state or national accreditation monopoly than can regulate the type and number of entrants into the higher-education field. The real challenge for new entrants, rather, is to show potential students and their parents that the programs on offer actually do rival or outperform their established competitors in terms of value for money. When it is difficult for customers to compare value between alternative suppliers, the established provider does enjoy the relative protection of a known and respected brand. Institutions like Princeton or the University of Michigan can sustain their customer bases and prices because people generally think they are high-quality providers, even if the data to justify their costs may be lacking. Places like BYU-Idaho and other innovative entrants do not have the luxury of resting on hazy laurels.

With college costs rising, however, would-be students are demanding clear demonstrations that their money will be well spent. Traditionally, value-seekers have been at a disadvantage: Compared with the value-for-money data available for many other products and services, obtaining the financial and other information needed to make a wise decision about college is confusing and difficult. But the situation is steadily improving, thanks to rankings and data like those supplied by U.S. News & World Report, Kiplinger’s, and Forbes.[18] Colleges are likely to see a significant increase in prospective students’ ability to make informed decisions, to the detriment of complacent colleges that have relied on their brand names and historical reputations to coast along. The result is sure to help newer institutions that have found better ways to provide value and to compete more effectively in the higher-education marketplace.

The Coming Revolution

To be sure, well-established leaders in any industry are used to dealing with competition from new technologies and new entrants with different business models. While they must always be on their toes, they do have advantages precisely because they are established and typically have well-developed and loyal customer bases. As Harvard’s Clayton Christensen observes, leaders generally respond to new technologies and business arrangements by incorporating them and using them to provide greater value to their customers, gaining revenue in return. He calls this process “sustaining innovation.”

For example, when Merrill Lynch encountered competitors offering online trading to investors, the financial firm improved the technology for use by its own brokers to enhance services to its existing customers. Similarly, major newspapers first responded to the internet by using it to amplify stories and nudge viewers to subscribe to their print editions, “hiding” much of their best content from web readers or charging for access to online copy. In response to the new world of online learning, universities have done much the same: As noted earlier, Harvard Extension and many other established schools have merely tweaked their business models to improve their services to existing customers (and to bring in new ones) without significantly altering their pricing or core business structures. In all three cases—the brokerage, newspaper, and higher-education industries—existing leaders have attempted to use establishment advantage and brand loyalty to absorb new ideas while retaining their dominant positions and approaches.

An industry leader does not face an existential threat from a technology or business plan that it can readily incorporate into its business model. What does present a serious danger, Christensen and his colleagues have found, is when an upstart focuses initially on a new or underserved part of the market with a breakthrough technology and business plan that are far from ready for “prime time” in the established market. During this period, the entrant focuses on customers the industry leaders have been steadily ignoring or may not particularly care about, perhaps because the leaders see little potential revenue. In many cases, the new entrant is indeed offering an inferior product or service, and because it is targeted to a “thin” area of the market, the leaders don’t perceive any real competition.

Real trouble for the existing leaders begins if and when new entrants update their creative business plans, steadily refine their new technologies and methods, increase their scales of operation, improve their lower-cost products, and start eyeing much larger possible markets. At some point, one or more of these suppliers in a minor or boutique market may—sometimes quite suddenly—decide to “invade” the long-established main market and deliver a knockout blow to the existing leaders. Christensen calls this process “disruptive innovation”—and its final stage is about to hit higher education.

The experiences of other industries indicate that the results can be dramatic. Christensen points out that when Sony introduced the first commercial battery-powered transistor radio in 1955, it did not initially aim at the high-end market, where companies like RCA provided a vacuum-tube living-room entertainment center controlled by the father of the house. Instead, it aimed at a part of the market that had not seemed profitable to firms like RCA: teenagers with limited budgets. Teenagers were not looking for a high-quality living-room listening experience; they were more interested in listening to the latest musical hits in their own rooms, and so did not mind the cheap and crackly plastic device Sony was marketing to them. Over the next decade, however, Sony improved the transistor radio to such a degree that it became a serious technical competitor to the vacuum-tube radios, offering similar quality at a much lower price. The company applied the same strategy to portable televisions, again aiming at potential buyers who were not even customers for the costly established products. Having perfected the transistor-based products for customers in these new markets, Sony then invaded the leading firms’ core markets—displacing the old technologies and the seemingly unshakable companies that employed them.[19]

Not all industries are equally vulnerable to such devastating disruptions, of course. Aside from the nature of the industry itself, another key factor is the degree to which regulations and statutes shape the industry’s market and cost structure. Rules, laws, and government-imposed standards can provide protection against competition even if they raise costs to consumers; by erecting artificial obstacles and expenses for potential new entrants, such regulations can erode or eliminate any advantages a newer, more nimble upstart might have. Established leaders will often take advantage of this red tape, lobbying government to enforce or alter rules in order to create barriers to new entrants and thus stave off competition.

One example of this dynamic is the field of telecommunications, where the technological transformation that has brought us everything from television and movies by phone line to Bluetooth was delayed in the United States for several years. The cause was the land-line monopoly provided to AT&T, as well as rules that made it difficult for other forms of communication to emerge. Before the computer revolution and the advent of the internet—developments that made the existing communication regulations seem irrelevant—it took access rule changes and a statutory break-up of AT&T to lay the groundwork for today’s regime of mobile phones and wireless networks.

Like AT&T, established players in higher education do receive some regulatory protection, as the industry is subject to certain rules and subsidies that influence its business model and shield current industry leaders. Requirements associated with subsidized student loans, for instance, tend to favor existing institutions; accreditation, while not a significant barrier, does offer some protection for established providers. Organizations representing major universities maintain strong lobbying operations in Washington and state capitals; well-connected research universities often obtain revenue from government grants; and, at least in periods of economic stability, state universities have the built-in financial advantage of state appropriations, which serve as a buffer from market pressures.

Despite these advantages, however, government programs, subsidies, and regulation will not save higher education. Among experts in the fields of education and industry transformation, there is a growing sense that higher education is approaching a tipping point—and that the industry will encounter disruptive innovation quite soon. The Innosight Institute’s Michael Horn, co-author with Clayton Christensen of several studies and publications on education, predicts: “I wouldn’t be surprised if in 10 to 15 years half of the institutions of higher education will have either merged or gone out of business.” According to Christensen, this change will not seriously threaten exclusive top-brand universities like Harvard and Yale, given the perceived high value of their brands and the connections and other extras they provide. Public universities, however, are in for a real shock.

There are two reasons why public universities are particularly vulnerable to the coming higher-ed revolution. The first is their typical market: Most state-school students are ideally suited to the online education and flexible approaches to instruction offered by low-cost upstarts. Furthermore, prospective state-school students generally come from households that are more price-sensitive than those considering elite private universities.

The second, and perhaps more urgent, reason for public schools’ vulnerability is the ongoing fiscal disaster in the states. As state budgets come under increasing pressure, tuition costs are likely to continue growing and services at state schools are likely to be slashed further by hard-pressed legislatures. California, for instance, hiked in-state tuition by 21% this year; over the next few years, the University of California system envisions annual tuition increases ranging from 8% to 16%. Other states face similarly grim prospects.

And the problem is only exacerbated by public universities’ politicized governance structures—which, when combined with the state schools’ lack of endowments to rival private universities’, makes it much more difficult for public schools to adjust and innovate in response to changing conditions and competition. Those looking for signs of the coming revolution in higher education would thus be wise to keep their eyes on America’s bloated public universities.

A Role for Government?

A fundamental restructuring of higher education—one that dramatically lowers costs and increases flexibility for millions of students—would be of enormous benefit to the country. As America faces stronger global economic competition, increasing the cost effectiveness of our approach to developing the human capital of our work force will be essential. Within our own borders, transforming higher education will also do much to increase the economic mobility of young Americans from lower-income families, and allow a broader swath of the population to grasp the American Dream.

But if reforming higher education is so important, shouldn’t we begin crafting public policies to help facilitate the change? No and yes. Because higher education is less constrained and distorted than other industries by statutes and regulation, there are far fewer impediments to the “natural” pressures of innovation; a strong case can thus be made for keeping lawmakers out of the way. Moreover, there is a danger that, once the federal government or even state governments begin to try to manage change—by, say, imposing or altering accreditation rules—they will become tools of established institutions, used to block new entrants and competitors.

That said, it might seem reasonable for the government to require some measurements of quality and effectiveness when taxpayer funds are at stake, such as in the rules for federal student aid or direct grants to universities. To that end, some proponents of radical change in higher education argue for a government quality metric such as the “Quality-Value Index” recommended by Christensen and others.[20] For each institution, the index would combine data on such measures as placement rates, salaries earned by graduates, graduate satisfaction, and loan-default rates. The idea is that Pell grants, subsidized loans, and other government funding to a university would be contingent on the institution’s maintaining a high quality score.

Other observers argue that government should also take the lead in creating a clear and standardized information system, which students and families could use to compare higher-education providers. But there is a danger here: Government-designed quality measurements are subject to manipulation by well-connected interest groups, and can lead providers to seek to increase their government scores by gaming the rating system. There is also the problem of government’s tendency to focus more on inputs rather than outputs when measuring quality. The advantage of value measurements that are developed by a range of non-government institutions, on the other hand, is that no single rating organization has a monopoly; the information industry itself can more easily evolve and improve in response to market demands.

Government policy can, however, help to improve students’ post-graduation bottom lines by shifting college costs away from debt financing and toward more financing through saving. Our current tax and subsidy structure, in particular, favors debt over savings for higher education. While there are certain education tax breaks for modest- or low-income students and their families, federally subsidized student loans encourage indebtedness while making it easier for colleges to raise tuition.

The federal government could also help reduce student indebtedness and boost savings for higher education by overhauling the way the tax code treats higher education. Today, the tax system treats fixed capital—such as investments in equipment—far more generously than investment in human capital, such as tuition for a college degree. The tax code needs to treat these different forms of investment more equally. For example, in a recent Heritage Foundation proposal for long-term fiscal reform, Saving the American Dream, Alison Acosta Fraser, William Beach, and I suggest introducing a tax deduction for up to four years of higher education.[21]

Second, ending the double taxation of savings would provide a strong incentive for Americans to save for college and for other major investments. The Heritage proposal exempts all saved income from taxation until it is spent (and in the case of higher education, savings used for tuition are not taxed even at that point). This change in federal taxation would reinforce the state tax benefits associated with state-sponsored 529 college savings funds, which have grown rapidly in recent years despite the troubled stock market (holdings now top $150 billion).

Looming on the horizon could even be a futures market in higher education. Some states already allow investors in 529 plans to lock in future tuition prices at state institutions, much as an investor might buy a futures contract for oil. With an expansion of savings for higher education, and thus a growing pool of funds linked to the financing of higher education, one could imagine commercial managers of large portfolios of college-savings funds beginning to develop a tuition futures market. Such a market might include tradable fixed-price contracts for, say, a year of tuition at the University of Virginia, and even put and call options so that parents could lock in the costs of a complete college education well before they have saved the full amount. Though the obvious advantage of such an approach would be providing parents with more predictability about future costs, a futures market might also provide added impetus for reform: Portfolio managers with billions in college savings and futures contracts would take a much keener interest in the long-term business model of colleges and universities, putting further pressure on the institutions to restructure their finances and improve the value they offer for money.

The Impossible Dream No More

For a growing number of Americans, a college degree is something obtained only through enormous sacrifice and indebtedness on their part or their parents’, or a dream that is entirely out of reach. Meanwhile, most college leaders live in a bubble in which the costs of ever more elaborate facilities, expanding administrative bureaucracies, and high-profile professors with light teaching loads can simply be passed on to customers in the form of higher tuition.

But those days are about to end. Underneath the surface, upstart institutions are perfecting radically new education technologies and business plans at the same time that young people and their parents are becoming more frustrated with the traditional higher-ed model, and more open-minded about alternatives. There is every reason to suspect that, quite soon, these new institutions will do to higher education what Sony did to radios and Apple did to computing. Afterward, our colleges and universities will never be the same. Few Americans, one suspects, will look back in regret.