It is a sad commentary when the President of our country celebrates the 39th anniversary of the Supreme Courts decision in 1973 to legalize abortion, the infamous Roe vs. Wade decision. This law is falsely heralded as a victory for women’s rights to choose! It is estimated that between 15 and 20 million abortions have taken place since then. The exact number is not important, but what is important to our way of thinking is the incorrect reason for this law. It is NOT to give women the right to choose but instead to give women a means to correct a prior mistake.
Had a woman not gotten pregnant in the first place, an abortion would not have been needed. And how did she get pregnant? By spreading her legs and having sex! Those of us understanding how a woman gets pregnant should not have to explain anything more on that subject. The abortion law is nothing else, it’s that simple.
Again, this deceitful way of stating something falsely, i.e. calling abortion a women’s choice is a part of what’s wrong in America. To add insult to injury, the people who oppose abortion are being ridiculed by the opposite side, being called terrible names and belittled. And that is definitely wrong! At the same time, we are being lectured that actions (even just words) have consequences. We ask: Is abortion not a consequence of an action taken place prior to it?
To us here at Common Sense University, the strongest argument against abortion just could be stated in two words: STEVE JOBS. As we know, Steve was not aborted by his birth mother but given up for adoption and we all know what he contributed to the world. This brings us to the next question: How many geniuses like Steve Jobs were aborted as a result of ‘a woman’s right to choose’? We will, unfortunately, never know. How many doctors, scientists, chemists or pioneers of new discoveries in medicine and other fields were killed by way of abortion?
When one considers the available ways for a woman to protect herself from becoming pregnant, we can only condemn the lackadaisical attitude women have when it comes to this. There are exceptions to our argument, things such as rape, incest and also the health of the mother could easily be excerpted and dealt with by passing appropriate laws but we do not need a Roe versus Wade pro- abortion law. We believe it is shameful that we do have such a law.
What’s wrong in America – Celebrating an anniversary of the Abortion Law is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>There were times in America when the people could trust information passed on to them by the Federal Government or even State and local governments. This is sadly no longer the case. At the same time, it is ironic because computerized information technology has improved so vastly that data collection by government should be so much more reliable and timely. We stand corrected, it is timely. It does only take a few days for updates on unemployment filings nationwide and other such information being made public. The problem is, it is unreliable.
We could list several examples of this but instead will concentrate on the employment picture in America. The Department of Labor of the Federal Government comes out every week and shares with us the number of people who have filed for unemployment benefits. On a monthly basis, we get the overall unemployment rate in the country. This statistic includes a number of things such as new unemployment filings, new jobs created and also the number of people who simply ‘left the job market’ or do no longer receive unemployment benefits. This changes the base constantly and results in some truly weird numbers. There can be no doubt that some element of manipulation is involved and this is at times so apparent that one has to question the accuracy of the reports.
We will try and state our analysis in simple terms: We are, for the purposes of this view, assume that the approximate number of full employment in America is 150,000,000 (one hundred fifty million), can we not deduct that 15,000,000 equals ten percent of the total? We believe we should, it’s simple math! When the total number of people reportedly not working in America is somewhere between twenty to twenty-five million, why is the unemployment rate not at least thirteen to sixteen percent? Is this a stupid question? We do not think so! But the Government apparently believes this and the media is accepting this and reports it as such.
When the Feds in Washington report that the economic growth in the country during a given quarter of a year is 1.2 percent, how can we accept and trust when it corrects this number down to 0.5 percent three months later. This is wrong and to our way of thinking a clear sign of report manipulations that should be challenged by everybody and not at all accepted as fact. We could present many more such examples of immense inaccuracies when it comes to what the Government tells us. We are convinced that this type of reporting could easily have a political element to it. President Obama would of course like to see the unemployment go down this year and he is willing to setlle for a downward trend instead. It’s referred to as “moving in the right direction” but it is based on number manipulations that are vastly inaccurate and it should not be accepted.
Is it any wonder that Americans are increasingly suspicious of what the government tells them? To us here at Common Sense University it is not! Only the ignorant are happy and do not care what they are being told and that is a shame. Trust in government should be a goal pursued by everybody who is serving in whatever capacity the population of this country.
What’s wrong in America – Part 2, Government Trust? is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>Iowa is a state in the middle of America, also referred to as ‘fly-over’ country. The state has a population of about three million, very similar to the population of San Diego County. Yet we hear that Iowa has 99 counties and some Republican candidates tell us with pride that they have visited all 99 counties. We say to this: ‘Whoopee‘! Now then, we are also being told that the Iowa caucuses on January will probably see a participation of one hundred to one hundred twenty thousand folks. That’s four percent of the population. Again, we say ‘Whoopee’.
The caucuses will determine which candidate will get how many of the 28 convention delegates. While we do not know any exact numbers, we estimate for purposes of presenting the absurdity of it all that the candidates combined spent altogether since last summer approximately twenty-eight million dollars in Iowa in campaign related expenses. This equates to one million bucks for one delegate. Now then, if this is not ridiculous, we don‘t know what is and we therefore say for the third time ‘Whoopee‘. Even if only twenty-one million were expended, it would still be ridiculous. From poll results in recent weeks and months, we know that no candidate has a share greater than thirty percent of the votes, this translates that the winner will walk away with about nine delegates and that is our last ‘Whoopee’.
If this does not show the idiocy with this primary election system, we do not know what is. We refuse to understand the importance of the Iowa caucuses. This is absolutely ridiculous and totally absurd. To boot, we are being told that there is a good chance that candidate Ron Paul could be the winner in Iowa. He has reportedly a great number of loyal supporters who will work hard to turn out the participants in the caucuses. And who is Ron Paul? He comes across as the disgruntled and grumpy old uncle who knows everything better than everybody else and his ideas and proposals are so whacky, Hollywood would not even make a funny movie out of it. He tells those who come and listen to him that he will when elected President cut one trillion dollars out of the annual federal budget. No details, no specifics just one nice round number! Since he hates the country’s military, can we assume that he will just abolish it? That would get him about two-thirds to his trillion dollar goal. Yet some people in Iowa must believe this absolute nonsense or else they would have run him out of the state a long time ago. Ron Paul espouses positions of such an extreme nature without any basis of reality or rationale, we can only conclude that some people in Iowa are truly backward hicks and hayseeds.
It is our hope that a victory by Ron Paul in Iowa will result in some serious re-thinking and review of the current primary election system. Tradition is nice but stupid is stupid and a continuation of stupid reflects just that, stupidity! We can do better than that in America.
What’s wrong in America – Part 1 – The idiotic Primary Election System is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>The following is the third part of Michael Mukasey’s speech:
People who wish to quibble about what it is we are at war with take the discussion off into absurdity. One such person is the President’s Assistant for National Security, John Brennan, who, before an audience at the Center for Strategic Studies, ridiculed the idea of a war on terrorism or on terror, saying it is impossible to have a war on a means or a state of mind.
This lack of clarity also distorts the view of policy makers about what is happening in the Middle East, and so they daydream about democratic movements when the reality on the ground is more populist than democratic. The principal beneficiary of populism is more likely to be the Muslim Brotherhood than the local spokesman for Facebook. The credo of the Muslim Brotherhood is succinct and chilling: Allah is our goal, the Prophet Muhammad is our leader, the Qu’ran is our constitution, jihad is our way, and death in the way of Allah is our promised end.
If the death of Osama bin Laden is more than simply a spasm, or an opportunity to engage in self-congratulation—if it helps provide some insight into the nature of what it is we are fighting—then it will have been significant indeed. If not, its significance will be substantially diminished.
The signs do not seem promising. Even on September 11 itself, as was pointed out by Fouad Ajami, there was no discussion whatever of the 19 people who perpetrated the atrocity. Ajami pointed in particular to Ziad Jarrah, the most Westernized of the hijackers. Raised in Beirut, Lebanon, to be cosmopolitan in the spirit of that city, he then went to Hamburg, Germany, where he was radicalized, and he then wound up at the controls of Flight 93, the flight that was supposed to hit the U.S. Capitol. It didn’t because the passengers learned what had already happened at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, figured out what was in store for them and their country, and chose to act.
There is much to be learned from those facts. Start with the last. We learn the importance of intelligence. The passengers on Flight 93 were able to act because of what they had learned about what was going on elsewhere. Intelligence gathering must be our number one priority. The people waging war on us are part of a movement that does not occupy any particular place or country that we can demolish and then pronounce ourselves the winners. They live in some cases among us, and the only way of opposing them successfully is to find out in advance what they intend to do and to thwart it.
Second, note that Jarrah was radicalized not in the Middle East, but in the West. We must be aware of those in our society who wish to create closed ethnic zones, where Muslims essentially run their own affairs and outsiders enter only at their peril. This has already happened in the suburbs of French cities, in parts of England, and in other places you would not expect it such as Malmo, Sweden, and it allows radicalization to go on undetected. Guidelines have been put in place to allow the FBI to function for the first time in its history as an intelligence gathering organization and not simply as a law enforcement agency. If the Bureau partners with state and local law enforcement, then the kind of insular activity that allowed Jarrah to be radicalized can be broken up. Those guidelines must remain in place, and must be defended.
Doing that will require an intelligent understanding of the part of the Constitution I didn’t discuss at the outset, the part that animated so much criticism of the Bush administration by those now in charge—the Bill of Rights. This part of the Constitution provides robust protection to both public and private activity that we value, which is essential for the continuation of our civic life. But it does not require that we close our eyes when there are people plainly setting the stage for activity that is in no way protected.
The First Amendment protects free speech and freedom of worship. It permits preaching even violence in the name of religion. But it does not guarantee that such speech will go undetected. Nor does it guarantee that evidence of it cannot be presented in a court when and if it is appropriate to charge that the speaker and those to whom he spoke understood this protected speech and took it as a call to unprotected action. This includes action that itself consists only of speech—such as an agreement to commit a crime, which is itself the crime of conspiracy.
The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, and contains a separate warrant clause providing that warrants may issue only on a finding of probable cause. That does not mean that a search conducted for intelligence purposes requires a warrant, only that it be reasonable.
The Fifth and Sixth Amendments guarantee due process, counsel to those accused of crimes, and the right to confront witnesses, but their application is limited to trials occurring in Article III courts. How much process is due and what kind of evidence may be received and under what circumstances in other tribunals, such as military commissions, is an entirely different story.
The message lurking in the structure of the Constitution is that those acting lawfully under it deserve at least the benefit of the doubt when they act to protect the common good. That is not meant to be a statement or a suggestion of a jurisprudential standard, a standard of law; but it is meant as a prudential standard, a standard of civics and public discourse. This standard will help keep intact the system that we depend on to preserve the nation that Abraham Lincoln called the last, best hope of earth—words that are truer today than they were when he spoke them during another time of trouble.
Executive Power in Wartime, 3/3 is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>The following is the second part of Michael Mukasey’s speech:
The administration also remains committed to figuring out a way to release those detained in Guantanamo, despite the fact that at least 20 percent of Guantanamo alumni have returned to the battlefield. We know that figure because 20 percent have been recaptured or killed. How many others are still in the fight is anyone’s guess.
So after all of this, where do we stand? The intelligence gathering techniques adopted and followed during the preceding administration not only remain on the books but are actively pursued. And thanks to a vigorous and courageous exercise of the Article II Commander-in-Chief power, and the splendid performance of a team of Navy Seals, Osama bin Laden is dead. I certainly would not minimize that achievement. He needed killing, and he and we needed it to be done at the hands of Americans. It was done in a way that allowed us to exploit the trove of intelligence that was found in his home—though one wishes that less had been said about it at the time, rendering it more effective. And his death has great symbolic significance, because of the status he had attained during the ten years since September 11. But it is impossible to gauge the significance of bin Laden’s death unless and until we recognize the simple fact that our encounter with what he stood for began much earlier than September 11, 2001.
What bin Laden stood for was Islamism, which—insofar as it holds the U.S. in a weird combination of awe and contempt—has been incubating for about as long as we have known about the other two “isms” that we successfully conquered in the last century. As a movement distinct from the religion of Islam itself, Islamism traces back to Egypt in the 1920s, when the loosely organized Muslim Brotherhood was established by a man named Hassan al-Banna. Al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood as a reaction to the modernizing influence of Kemal Ataturk, who dismantled the shell of what was left of the Muslim caliphate in Turkey, banned the fez and headscarves, and dragged his country into the 20th century.
Al-Banna’s principal disciple was also an educator—a bureaucrat in the education department of the Egyptian government named Sayyid Qutb. Qutb caused enough trouble in Egypt to get himself awarded a traveling fellowship in 1948, the year al-Banna was killed. Regrettably for us, Qutb chose to travel to Greeley, Colorado. And although it would be hard to imagine a more inoffensive place than post-World War II Greeley, Colorado, for a man like Qutb it was Sodom and Gomorrah. He hated everything he saw: American haircuts, enthusiasm for sports, jazz, and what he called the “animal-like mixing of the sexes,” even in church. His conclusion was that Americans were “numb to faith in art, faith in religion, and faith in spiritual values altogether,” and that Muslims must regard “the white man, whether European or American . . . [as] our first enemy.”
Qutb later returned to Egypt, quit the civil service, and joined the Muslim Brotherhood. He welcomed Gamal Abdel Nasser’s coup against the corrupt monarchy of King Farouk in 1952, but then became disillusioned with Nasser for failing to institute Sharia law. He opposed Nasser, and was subsequently arrested and tortured. However, he continued to write and agitate for Islam and against Western civilization, particularly against Jews, whom he blamed for atheistic materialism and considered the worst enemies of Muslims. He was released for a time, but eventually was re-arrested, convicted of conspiracy against the government, and hanged in 1966.
Many members of the Brotherhood fled to Saudi Arabia, where they found refuge and ideological sustenance. Qutb’s brother was among those who fled and taught the doctrine in Saudi Arabia. Among his students were Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian who would become a leading Al Qaeda ideologist, and a then-obscure Osama bin Laden, the pampered child of one of the richest construction families in the country. And the rest, as they say, is history.
That history did not come to these shores on September 11—or even on February 26, 1993, when a truck bomb detonated in the basement of the World Trade Center, killing six and wounding hundreds. It came at the latest in the 1980s, when a couple of FBI agents spotted a group of men taking what looked like particularly aggressive target practice in Calverton, Long Island. When they approached, they were accused of what we now call racial profiling, and they backed off. In November 1990, one of those men, El-Sayyid Nosair, assassinated a right-wing Israeli politician, Meir Kahane, in the ballroom of a Manhattan hotel. When the 1993 World Trade Center bombers demanded the freeing of Nosair from jail, it became apparent that the Kahane assassination had not been the lone act of a lone gunman. Authorities reviewed the amateur video of Kahane’s speech the night he was killed and discovered that one of those 1993 bombers had been in the hall when Kahane was shot. Further investigation disclosed that another was driving the intended getaway vehicle.
The man who served as the spiritual advisor to Nosair and the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called blind sheikh, along with Nosair and several others, were tried before me and convicted for participating in a conspiracy to conduct a war of urban terror against this country—a war that included the Kahane murder, the first World Trade Center bombing, and a plot to blow up other landmarks around New York and assassinate Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak when he visited the United Nations. The list of unindicted co-conspirators in that case included Osama bin Laden.
At the time, all of this was treated as a series of crimes—unconventional crimes, to be sure, but crimes nevertheless. This despite the fact that in 1996, and again in 1998, Osama bin Laden declared that he and his cohorts were at war with the United States.
In 1998, the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were bombed almost simultaneously. Again the criminal law was invoked, this time in an indictment that named Osama bin Laden as a defendant. Apparently he was unimpressed, or at least undeterred, because in 2000, Al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, killing 17 sailors. It would have carried out the bombing of another naval vessel, but for the fact that the barge carrying the explosives was overloaded and sank.
Then came September 11, and to the call “bring them to justice” was added the call “bring justice to them.” We were told that we were at war more than 50 years after Sayyid Qutb determined that Islamists would have to make war on us, about 15 years after Islamists had made it clear that they were training for war with us, and five years after Osama bin Laden made it official with a declaration of war.
In fighting Islamism, we are handicapped at the strategic level by the refusal of those in authority to acknowledge the goals of our adversaries. Those goals are essentially political, and involve the recreation of an Islamic caliphate and the imposition of Sharia law over as broad a swath of the world as possible. This is a profoundly anti-democratic movement at its core, and it regards the whole idea of man-made law as anathema. Instead, we try to be inoffensive by using a term that originated in the administration in which I served, and we refer to a war on terror or terrorism.
Executive Power in Wartime, 2/3 is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>The following is the first part of Michael Mukasey’s speech:
President Obama campaigned for office largely on the claim that his predecessor had shredded the Constitution. By the Constitution, he could not have meant the document signed on September 17, 1787. Article II of that document begins with a simple declaration: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Not “some” or “most” or even “all but a teeny-weeny bit” of the executive power. The President is vested with all of it. This is particularly noteworthy when compared with the enumerated legislative powers vested in Congress: “All legislative Powers herein granted.” The Founders understood, based in part on their unfortunate experience under the Articles of Confederation, that the branch of government most likely to be in need of the ability to act quickly and decisively is the executive. The branch most likely to overreach is the legislature.
Perhaps, then, candidate Obama was thinking of the Bill of Rights in claiming that President Bush shredded the Constitution. But leaving that question aside for now, let us consider how President Obama has fared in undoing the Bush policies he opposed. He began dramatically in January 2009 by issuing a series of executive orders. According to one, Guantanamo was to be closed within a year. Even though the principal planner of September 11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, had announced that he would plead guilty before a military tribunal at Guantanamo, the Justice Department announced in November 2009 that the military commission was cancelled. Instead, KSM would be brought to the mainland United States to stand trial. In response, Congress passed a statute, relying on its constitutionally-enumerated power of the purse, directing that no federal funds be used to bring any detainee from Guantanamo to the U.S. As a result, the Guantanamo military commission trial for KSM and other detainees charged in connection with September 11 is back on.
Another executive order in January 2009 suspended the CIA interrogation program. Instead of these allegedly disgraceful and unconstitutional interrogation techniques, it was announced that anyone acting on behalf of the U.S. government, even a highly trained CIA operative seeking sensitive security-related information, is limited by the Army Field Manual. This manual—because it was drafted for general use—is pitched to the capabilities of the most junior recruit in the field interrogating someone he has just captured. In fact, it has been available on the Internet for years and has been used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation.
The abandoned CIA program involved—in what is probably the most disastrous marketing term since New Coke—“enhanced interrogation” techniques which were, in fact, completely lawful. When detainees were subjected to those techniques—detainees who self-selected as both knowledgeable of Al Qaeda and resistant to lesser techniques—we learned a great deal. Three of these detainees—Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Abdel Rahim al Nashiri—gave up a huge trove of valuable information. Not only did KSM disclose general information on how Al Qaeda moved money and people, but also specific information that helped disrupt other plots. One such plot involved airplanes attacking the Library Tower in Los Angeles. It was to be carried out by a South Asian group headed by a man named Hambali. Other information resulted in the capture of people involved in a plan to develop a biological weapons capability in the U.S. The list goes on.
Not only has this interrogation program been abandoned, but when people today are apprehended in connection with terrorist plots directed at this country—and there have been more than 20 since September 11—most are turned over immediately to law enforcement authorities, informed of their Miranda rights, and treated as routine criminal suspects.
What do we lose in this process? With the would-be Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, we lost the chance at information about who had built his bomb. From bombs that have shown up in packages originating in Yemen, it appears that the same bomb maker is still in business, and he is believed to be responsible for a bomb that injured Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef, the man largely responsible for Saudi Arabia’s counter-terrorism efforts.
Although Guantanamo remains open, the President remains committed to closing it. For example, no new detainees are being brought to Guantanamo. We learned a month or two ago that a man named Warsame was apprehended and was thought to be in possession of valuable intelligence. He was placed aboard a naval vessel and debriefed for two months, after which he was advised of his Miranda rights and brought to the U.S. The administration disdains military tribunals, notwithstanding the fact that they have been used in our history from the Revolutionary War to World War II and are provided for specifically in a statute passed by Congress called the Military Commissions Act.
Executive Power in Wartime, 1/3 is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>The following is the second part of Vaclav Klauss speech:
After the fall of communism, the Czech Republic wanted to reassume its place among European democracies. We did not want to sit aside—as we were forced to do throughout the communist era—and European Union membership was the only alternative. Nothing else legitimizes a country in Europe these days. Therefore we joined the EU in May 2004. However, for those of us who spent most of our lives in the authoritative, oppressive, and non-functioning communist regime, the ongoing weakening of democracy and of free markets on the European continent represents something we did not expect and did not wish for in the moment of the fall of communism.
The most visible European problem today is the European monetary union, which was presented as the most important unification achievement following the Maastricht Treaty. The realization of this monetary union has not delivered the positive effects that—rightly or wrongly—had been expected from it. It was intended to accelerate economic growth, reduce inflation, and protect member states against external economic disruptions or so-called exogenous shocks. It has not worked. After the establishment of the euro zone, the economic growth of its member states slowed down relative to previous decades, thus increasing the gap between the rate of growth in the euro zone countries and that in other major economies. The internal disequilibria—such as trade imbalances and state budget imbalances—became larger, not smaller. And there is no indicator pointing towards a growing convergence in the euro zone countries. During its first decade of existence, a common currency has not led to any measurable homogenization of the member states’ economies.
It should have been clear to all, as it was to me, that the idea of a single European currency was essentially wrong—that it would create huge economic problems and lead inevitably to an undemocratic centralization of Europe. To my great regret, this is exactly what has been happening. The euro zone, which comprises 17 countries, is not an “optimum currency area” as defined by economic theory. In a currency or monetary union—which amounts to an extreme form of fixed exchange rates—it is inevitable that the costs of establishing and especially maintaining it exceed its benefits. Most economic commentators were satisfied by the ease and apparent inexpensiveness of the establishment of Europe’s common monetary area. In recent years, however, the negative effects of the straightjacket of a single currency have become more and more evident. When good economic weather prevailed, no visible problems arose. But when bad economic weather set in, the lack of homogeneity manifested itself quite strongly.
It is difficult to speculate about the future of the euro. I suppose that it will not collapse, because a huge amount of political capital was invested in its existence. It will continue to exist, but at a very high price in terms of large-scale fiscal transfers—the shuffling around of problems between countries, which amounts to a non-solution—and of low economic growth rates.
The second reason for European economic problems—not specifically European, but worse in Europe then elsewhere—has to do with the quality, productivity and efficiency of its economic and social system. Europe is characterized by a seemingly people-friendly, non-demanding, paternalistic and—in consequence—insufficiently productive economic and social system called die soziale Markwirtschaft, or social democracy. This system, with its generous social benefits, weakened motivation, shortened working hours, prolonged years of study, lowered retirement ages, diminished the supply of labor—both at the macro level and structurally—and led to very slow economic growth.
In Europe, we have witnessed a gradual shift away from liberalizing and removing barriers and towards a massive introduction of regulation from above, an ever-expanding welfare system, new and more sophisticated forms of protectionism, and continuously growing legal and regulatory burdens on business. All of these weaken and restrain freedom, democracy and democratic accountability, not to mention economic efficiency, entrepreneurship and competitiveness.
Europeans today prefer leisure to performance, security to risk-taking, paternalism to free markets, collectivism and group entitlements to individualism. They have always been more risk-averse than Americans, but the difference continues to grow. Economic freedom has a very low priority here. It seems that Europeans are not interested in capitalism and free markets and do not understand that their current behavior undermines the very institutions that made their past success possible. They are eager to defend their non-economic freedoms—the easiness, looseness, laxity and permissiveness of modern or post-modern European society—but when it comes to their economic freedoms, they are quite indifferent.
The critical situation in Europe today is visible to everybody. It is not possible to hide it. I had believed that this spectacle would be a help to the cause of political and economic freedom in Europe, but this is not proving to be the case. Of course, with the way your American government has been going, you might be able to catch up with us—in terms of our problems—very soon. But you are not as far along yet. So maybe seeing Europe’s crisis today will at least help you in America turn back toward freedom.
The Crisis of the European Union: Causes and Significance, 2 of 2 is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>The following is the first part of Vaclav Klauss speech:
As some of you may know, this is not my first contact with Hillsdale College. I vividly remember my visit to Hillsdale more than ten years ago, in March 2000. The winter temperatures the evening I arrived, the sudden spring the next morning, and the summer the following day can’t be forgotten, at least for a Central European who lives—together with Antonio Vivaldi—in le quattro stagioni. My more important and long-lasting connection with Hillsdale is my regular and careful reading of Imprimis. I have always considered the texts published there very stimulating and persuasive.
The title of my previous speech at Hillsdale was “The Problems of Liberty in a Newly-Born Democracy and Market Economy.” At that time, we were only ten years after the fall of communism, and the topic was relevant. It is different now. Not only is communism over, our radical transition from communism to a free society is over, too. We face different challenges and see new dangers on the horizon. So let me say a few words about the continent of Europe today, which you’ve been visiting on your cruise.
You may like the old Europe—full of history, full of culture, full of decadence, full of fading beauty—and I do as well. But the political, social and economic developments here bother me. Unlike you, I am neither a visitor to Europe nor an uninvolved observer of it. I live here, and I do not see any reason to describe the current Europe in a propagandistic way, using rosy colors or glasses. Many of us in Europe are aware of the fact that it faces a serious problem, which is not a short- or medium-term business cycle-like phenomenon. Nor is it a consequence of the recent financial and economic crisis. This crisis only made it more visible. As an economist, I would call it a structural problem, which will not, by itself, wither away. We will not simply outgrow it, as some hope or believe.
It used to look quite different here. The question is when things started to change. The post-World War II reconstruction of Europe was a success because the war eliminated, or at least weakened, all kinds of special-interest coalitions and pressure groups. In the following decades, Europe was growing, peaceful, stable and relevant. Why is Europe less successful and less relevant today?
I see it basically as a result of two interrelated phenomena—the European integration process on the one hand, and the evolution of the European economic and social system on the other—both of which have been undergoing a fundamental change in the context of the “brave new world” of our permissive, anti-market, redistributive society, a society that has forgotten the ideas on which the greatness of Europe was built.
I will start with the first issue, because I repeatedly see that people on other continents do not have a proper understanding of the European integration process—of its effects and consequences. It is partly because they do not care—which is quite rational—and partly because they accept a priori the idea that a regional integration is—regardless of its form, style, methods and ambitions—an exclusively positive, progressive and politically correct project. They also very often accept the conventional wisdom that the weakening of nation-states, and the strengthening of supranational institutions, is a movement in the right direction. I know there are many opponents of such a view in your country—at such places as Hillsdale—but it has many supporters as well.
A positive evaluation of developments in Europe over the past 50 years can be explained only as an underestimation of what has been going on recently. In the 1950s, the leading idea behind the European integration was to liberalize, to open up, to remove all kinds of barriers which existed at the borders of individual countries, to enable the free movement of goods, services, people and ideas across the European continent. This was undisputedly a step forward, and it helped Europe significantly.
But European integration took a different course during the 1980s, and the decisive breakthrough came with the Maastricht Treaty in December 1991. Political interests that sought to unify and create a new superpower out of Europe started to dominate. Integration had turned into unification, and liberalization had turned into centralization of decision making, the harmonization of rules and legislation, the strengthening of European institutions at the expense of institutions in the member states, and what can even be called post-democracy. Since then, Europe’s constituting elements—the states—have been consistently and systematically undermined. It was forgotten that states are the only institutions where real democracy is possible.
The second part of this speech will be posted in two weeks…
The Crisis of the European Union: Causes and Significance, 1 of 2 is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>Having seen all three September debates, we are only confused about why the powers to be in the Republican Party believe this to be good for the party and the country. From past experiences, we consider it to be factual that at least five if not six of the current flock of candidates do not have a snowballs chance in hell to ever becoming President of this great country of ours. We have long held the believe that this next election is probably the most crucial ever for America. The current administration has proven to all rational thinking people that they are totally incompetent from the top to the bottom and should have never been elected in the first place. But American voters have done this type of thing several times in our history. We are old enough to remember how Jimmy Carter got elected to the highest office of the land and how this micro-managing former peanut farmer from Georgia caused more problems in a very short period of time. But in 1980, Americans recognized this mistake and corrected course for the country by electing Ronald Reagan.
We do have a much worse situation now in that we are tumbling towards financial ruin and insolvency. Instead of discussing plans to reduce our unsustainable debt, we only hear how the country can reduce the speed towards bankruptcy by modifying the vast increase of more debt in the next decade. This is serious stuff, folks and we should not take this lightly.
But back to the Republican candidates and the multiple debates. Considering the dire economic situation we find ourselves in with high unemployment, ever increasing deficits, the incompetence in the White House, what do we have to hear from the Republicans? We hear them squabble over whether or not the Texas Governor Rick Perry issued an Executive order about vaccinations for sixth graders. This is an issue that never materialized to be a problem anyway. Then we have to listen to the Congressman from Texas Ron Paul that we in a way are to blame for the 9-11 attacks in America because we have stationed troops in a number of countries around the world.
What hogwash! It is a shame that the Republicans cannot do better than that or at least device a system whereby the number of ego-driven candidates is being reduced after each debate by at least one if not two. To our way of thinking, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry are the clear frontrunners and there maybe a third candidate who could surprise us but if anybody in their right mind thinks that people like Ron Paul, Michelle Bachmann, former Governors Huntsman and Johnson as well as former Senator Santorum have even a minor change, they are delusional. We also cannot see Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain ever winning the nomination of the party and it does not look like that Sarah Palin will join the race. The current debates are truly ego-serving events and do not help Americans to pick the right man for the job to oppose Barack Obama in the general election next year in November 2012. We can only hope that this absurdity will soon end.
The Theatre of the Absurd is a post from: Common Sense University
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]]>We here at Common Sense University have been listening to him from the beginning when he first made noises about becoming President of the United States. Up until he got elected, it was all hyped in sloganeering “Yes, we can”, “Hope and Change” and more. Then he became President and he showed the world that he would deliver on his promises. He just needed some money to turn this economy around. Democrat-led Congress gave him all he wanted, nearly one trillion dollars, to immediately put America back to work with “shovel-ready jobs”. We know now how that turned out, no additional comment necessary!
Now he will give another speech this week to present his job creating plan and to turn the economy around. What he will read from his teleprompter we do not know in total but we know one thing for certain. He will ask Congress to pass another major stimulus bill to create jobs. In a way, the President reminds us of the two guys, let’s call them ‘Dumb’ and ‘Stupid’ who went into business for themselves. They decided to buy produce at a wholesale market and drive it to a major street corner in downtown where they would sell the apples, oranges, plums, strawberries and so on. They argued about what size truck to buy, Dumb wanted a small truck for starters while his buddy Stupid wanted a big truck. They settled on the little one. They now bought the produce every morning and drove into downtown to sell the goods. The only mistake they made was that they sold it for the same price. After one week, they tallied the money and found out there had been no profit. Stupid told his friend Dumb “I told you, we need a bigger truck!” End of story.
What we at this time have concluded about Obama is that he is way over his head and totally incompetent being President, what we do not know for certain is if what is happening to America is by design. His pre-election rhetoric would indicate it was his plan all along to bankrupt this country and turn us into a fully socialized one. Remember his little talk with Joe the Plumber in 2008 when he told him it was a good thing to spread the wealth around? The voters of America gave him a report card and answer to his plans and performance after his first two years in office when they turned the House of Representatives over to the Republicans. But he has not learned from that and instead now resorts to name-calling and the like to make the Republicans the fall guys for America’s misery and poor economic situation. He is still blaming his predecessor George Bush and unfortunately many people in this country still believe that.
Let’s not go along with his scheme! We just have to wait him out for the next seventeen months until January 2013. It will be hard for many if not most Americans but major mistakes are painful and we are seeing this play out before our eyes. We are simply paying a price for the mistake a majority of American voters made on Election Day in November 20008.
It is time for Action, not just more stories? is a post from: Common Sense University
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