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Chuck Norris Fact No. 39: “Chuck Norris stared evil in the eye and it went into hiding.”

America’s favorite action star is doing just that this election – calling on evangelical Christians across the nation to join him in crushing the creep of socialism under President Obama.

Norris and his wife, Gena, have filmed a public service announcement, unveiled exclusively at WND, wherein the two urge Christians to help save the country in November.

“We are here to talk about a growing concern we all share,” Chuck Norris explains. “If we look to history, our great country and freedom are under attack. We’re at a tipping point and, quite possibly, our country as we know it may be lost forever if we don’t change the course in which our country is headed.”

Gena warns that voter apathy among evangelicals in 2008 may have contributed to Obama’s election in the first place.

“With our country at a crossroads, Chuck and I have asked ourselves what we can be doing to help support this great country we’re blessed to live in and how we can encourage our like-minded American brothers and sisters to unite and let their voices be heard,” she said. “It is estimated that in the 2008 election, 30 million evangelical Christians stayed home on voting day and Obama won the election by 10 million votes.”

Chuck cautions Christians about the cost of doing nothing while the nation spirals into a state of socialism from which there will be no return.

“We know you love your family and your freedom as much as Gena and I do,” he says in his appeal to Americans. “And it is because of that we can no longer sit quietly or stand on the sidelines and watch our country go the way of socialism or something much worse.”

Gena urged Christians to register and cast their votes on Election Day to ensure “our voices will be heard.”

Chuck recalled the cautionary words of great patriots on the subject of preserving liberty:

“As Edmund Burke said, ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men and women do nothing.’

“Our great president, Ronald Reagan said, ‘Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same.’”

Likewise, Gena noted, “President Reagan went on to say that ‘You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.’”

Chuck Norris concludes the announcement by encouraging Americans to close ranks and defend their great nation “for God and country.”

“Please stand with us,” he urges. “Let’s unite for God and country. And may God continue to bless the United States of America. See you at the polls.”

Norris has been writing a weekly column exclusively for WND since Oct. 23, 2006. The star of “Walker: Texas Ranger” and some of the biggest action pictures ever, Norris has also reached a new generation as part of the Internet craze for one-liners usually labeled not as jokes but as “facts.”

In “The Official Chuck Norris Fact Book,” Norris gives readers not only his favorite “facts,” roundhouse-kicked by the man himself, but also the stories behind the facts and the code by which he lives his life.

In his bestselling book, “Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America,” Norris provides real solutions for solving the nation’s problems, moving the country forward and changing its course for the better.

As history shows, millions of Americans follow when Chuck Norris leads.

In 2008, Zeta Interactive confirmed that when Norris endorsed former Arkansas Gov. Huckabee in a WND column, it sparked a spike of 66 percent in Internet posts on Huckabee.

When Norris wrote of his endorsement of Huckabee, the former governor was holding support from about eight percent of voters, according to Rasmussen Reports, which is considered one of the most accurate tracking polls available.

Within a couple days, the time it took for the Norris column to make the rounds of the blogs and media sites, Huckabee’s support rose to 10 percent, his first time ever in double digits, and within another day it was at 12 percent.

Huckabee’s campaign also reported a surge in campaign contributions – of about $550,000 – in just days after the Norris endorsement.

Norris’ career began not in movies, television or in the world of Internet trivia. The man who has employed martial arts in so many of his pictures first came to the world’s attention as a real-life martial arts star. He was a six-time undefeated World Professional MiddleWeight Karate Champion. He was also a renowned teacher in the martial arts, with celebrity students including Steve McQueen, Bob Barker, Priscilla Presley and Donnie and Marie Osmond.

He has gone on to found the United Fighting Arts Federation with more than 2,300 black belts all over the world. In 1997, Norris achieved another milestone in his life by being the first man ever in the Western Hemisphere to be awarded an eighth-degree Black Belt Grand Master recognition in the Tae Kwon Do system. This was a first in 4,500 years of tradition.

The Norrises share that next to their family, their greatest mission in life is their KICKSTART KIDS Foundation. In 1992 with the help of President George H.W. Bush, the program was launched in four public middle schools in Houston. For over 20 years, KICKSTART KIDS has developed and delivered an in-school physical education program based on martial arts that teaches responsibility and character development, while building self-esteem and engaging kids in a school-based activity. The program is dedicated to giving middle school students the tools and support necessary to resolve conflicts, avoid participating in gangs, choose a drug-free lifestyle, resist negative peer pressure, remain in school until they graduate, achieve a higher level of academic success and ultimately become productive members of our communities. Today KSK serves more than 7,000 children daily and has graduated approximately 70,000 students, with many going on to college.

August 29th, 2012

Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD.

The Obama’s presidency was seen a fantasy to the centuries old white legacy of the White House. The power and its glorification associated with the White House have not resulted in any ground breaking discoveries even after Obama’s entry to the Washington landscape. The crucial challenge Obama faces is how to cope with change and adaptability to a New Beginning that he envisaged but betrayed by conscientious compromise to ensure his own political survival. Paul Craig Roberts called him “The World’s Least Powerful Man – the Obama Puppet.” Obama did not pave the way to hell for the unwanted wars but found it already paved by George Bush to keep on solo walking to entrapment - the Madness of Unthinking. Politics is a game of new and creative ideas not a fixed entity or an end to itself. Those who perceive “points of no return” and scramble “red lines” indulge in self-geared acts of absurdity and can hardly relate to the contemporary informed global intellect and changing priorities of the mankind, open and flexible to change and futuristic developments. On all of his major policy statements and strategic intents from the immediate closing of the Guantanmobay Terrorism Headquarters, the end of two bogus wars, the lobbyists dominated politics, re-approaching diplomacy and outreach to normalization of relations with the Muslim world, President Obama got glued to the form and forgot the essence of meaning and purpose for which he won the election - “Yes We Can.”

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Most politicians do read Machiavelli’s Prince to perform at the political theatre. On the election night 2008, Obama spoke of “remaking America” but while accepting the wishful Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo and argued not for much needed peacemaking to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he defended the Bushism of waging aggressive wars against the poor and destitute nations out of the scope of the US animosity radar. George Bush and his neo-conservatives warmongers invested heavily to make America morally, politically and financially bankrupt by waging the bogus wars on terrorism. There was a strategy in No Strategy after the 9/11 events to demonstrate to the fearful American masses that some forceful measures and foreign war engagements will be on the active Bush’s agenda to protect the US security interests. The ultimate aims of the wars on terrorism were to create more terrorism and to destabilize those nations having reservoirs of untapped oil and gas resources and to crop up new markets for the American corporations to sell more arms and weapons.

To spotlight the cruelty of the on-going wars of terrorism for fun and enjoyment, Gordon Duff (“The Baggage of America Extremism: No Enemy, No Negotiation, Only the Dead are Real”, ICH, December 16, 2009), outlines the dilemma: “We had become addicted to the "black and white" version of Bu<snip>ism to the extent that we, as a nation, have given up thought entirely.  We know we can't win.  Do we expect an army of angels to come down from heaven, the ones Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld dreamed of, or are we going to start acting like a world leader again.”

Obama’s politics does not generate any creative enthusiasm as was perhaps anticipated during his first presidential election campaign. In times of crises and adversity, he appears confused to face the facts of life and global affairs but always willing to strike backdoor compromises if the Israeli lobbyists insist on his role-play. To a reputable international journalist, Robert Dreyfuss (“Obama: 'I Have Met Israel and It Is "Us"'  ICH- the Nation 7/12/2010), Obama will even surrender the White House to entice the Israeli interest more so in a presidential election year:

-“Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu set up another illegal Jewish settlement, this time on the White House lawn. And, it appears, President Obama has agreed to serve as its armed guard. So complete was Obama’s identification with Israel yesterday that he actually referred to Israel as “us” before correcting himself:  “We strongly believe that, given its size, its history, the region that it’s in, and the threats that are leveled against us—against it, that Israel has unique security requirements.”
It is not the Audacity of Hope but consequential dictate of history when nations and leaders violate the Laws of God, and challenge the limits of reason; they end-up in self defeat and destruction. If diplomacy was the foremost choice to search for feasible political accommodation, President Obama did not bother to use it; instead he continued the Bush dictum of insanity in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida's leaders to lay down their arms,” In his Oslo Nobel Peace Prize speech, President Obama claimed: “to say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism, it is recognition of history.” History offers a learning role that you could not comprehend it. History shall judge you Mr Obama by your actions, not claims. With escalating war efforts and additional troops to kill more innocent civilians and disturb the Afghan graveyards, you have kept the insane momentum to airlift more men and material to Afghanistan and that does not signal peacemaking at all. After the American failure in Iraq, You want to conquer Afghanistan and Pakistan to maintain the Bush contracted gas and oil pipelines that sound against the Nature of Things and it is not going to happen in the foreseeable future. The consequences are yet to come.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the American thought process on the War on Terrorism and the emerging conflict with Iran. David Perez (“Imagine”, Information Clearing House, 02/2009), attempts to set out the humanistic concerns:

“Imagine being in a room of maimed, deformed and tortured Iraqis, Afghans and Palestinians, accompanied by widows and orphans mourning because their entire family has been exterminated. I imagine this roomful of walking dead sitting around while my friends and I discuss how “realistic” we in the U.S. must be with our electoral politics, how our expectations need to “practical,” how peace is just so <snip> “complicated.” ….  imagine these victims looking at us with blank, scarred faces as we congratulate ourselves for selecting a new President who talks about “our God-given right to lead,” about our duty to spread U.S.-style democracy throughout the globe, and how we are now just so “proud to be American.”

America could have learnt from the despotic Europeans who fought and killed millions during the two world wars before settling in at the EU tables to define their religious unity and common economic and political interests. Those who conspired animosity and conducted the warmongering against the mankind of which they were a part, are long buried in graveyards and not available for accountability. Surely, they knew how to escape the dictate of history and now the futuristic European generations are pretending to be civilized after having been in the dark ages for centuries. Recently, one 111 years old British soldier - the last remaining WW1 British veteran made it clear before dying (BBC, 10/2009), “we don’t know why we fought and killed other fellow human beings. Wars do not seem to solve any problem.”   One wonders, why human beings fight with their fellow human beings.  Edward Glover (War, Sadism and Pacifism) noted: “human beings fight because they are afraid, afraid that worse will happen to them if they do not… to pugnacity and hatred, we must add fear.”

Could we – the rational human beings, take notice of the continued insanity and help to stop its overwhelming convergence to safeguard the future generations from the scourge of wars?  This was the role and responsibility of the creations of the UNO, the Security Council and other institutionalized systems to make the humanity safe and secure. Perhaps the human nature is at least part wicked and in part foolish, not realizing the consequences of actions of the few war lords of the world, C.E.M Joad wonders, “the pacifist’s question becomes, how can human beings be prevented from suffering from the results of their wickedness and folly?”  C.E.M Joad (Guide to Modern Wickedness), makes the obvious facts abundantly clear that war diminishes happiness and lowers morality….and that men simply do not see that war is foolish and useless and wicked. Now as President Obama claimed that it is necessary and wise and honorable.  The bigger question may be asked: how can we induce other leaders to perceive their error of perception and judgment and to make them realize the truth that wars are wrong, and those waging the wars are not peacemakers but wicked enemies of the humanity and certainly not suitable to be prized for wars but to be held accountable for the death and destruction of millions of the fellow human beings.

David Perez (“Imagine”, Information Clearing House, 02/2009), attempts to recall the forgotten consequences – the untold sufferings and agony of the civilian victim population of the War on Terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how do they reason the unreason in a language of silence:

“Imagine these charred visitors with missing limbs bowing their heads and wondering if they should somehow envy us for always finding a way to celebrate and party and bask in our entertainment-soaked culture – even when it comes to our “handsome” President being sworn in at the same time their homes were being incinerated, courtesy of our state-of-the-art weaponry.  Perhaps these “unfortunate” sufferers will understand that we can’t prosecute our own war criminals, because, you see, we simply “have to move on.” And maybe they’ll understand that not one U.S. leader has ever – ever – called our bombings and invasions a terrorist act………May be they’ll understand us when we shake our heads and say, “Well, this is just how politics work here. Sure it’s corrupt but, hell, what can we do?”

"I face the world as it is," President Obama explained at the Oslo Nobel Peace Award ceremony (December 10, 2009), but refusing to renounce the war for his nation or under his leadership, saying that he is obliged to protect and defend the United States. But Obama misled the informed and conscientious global intellect as no nation is threatening the American people or their security. “No matter how justified, war promises human tragedy”, he said. Norman Soloman (Commondreams.Org) “Mr President War is not Peace”, Dec 10, 2009), questions the intent and eloquence of Obama’s speech and strikes a warning note:

“War is not peace. It never has been. It never will be…….in the name of pragmatism, Obama spoke of “the world as it is” and threw a cloak of justification over the grisly escalation in Afghanistan by insisting that “war is sometimes necessary” -- but generalities do nothing to mitigate the horrors of war being endured by others.”

America’s political elite so often remembers Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to fill the moral and intellectual blanks but neglects his advice: “The chain reaction of evil... wars producing more wars... must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”  In a war propelled economy of the few, and given the US history of wars for more than 220 battlefield engagements in its two centuries of evolutionary history and the perpetuated insanity of the warlords to make more wars, Mike Prysner (“Amazing speech by an Iraq war veteran”: 12/25/2009), an Iraqi War veteran has these daring observations to share with the informed and concerned humanity:

“Our real enemy is not the ones living in a distant land whose names or policies we don't understand; The real enemy is a system that wages war when it's profitable, the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it's profitable, the Insurance Companies who deny us Health care when it's profitable, the Banks who take away our homes when it's profitable. Our enemies are not several hundred thousands away. They are right here in front of us.”

To reconstruct a different and more sustainable future for the besieged humanity, it is incumbent upon the intellectuals, academics, visionaries, poets, philosophers and the thinking people of the Universe to perceive and articulate new and creative ideas, new political imagination for the 21st century organizations to be functional for the people, by the people and accountable to the supremacy of the people’s will.

Time and encompassing opportunities warrant New Thinking, New Leaders and New Visions for change and the future-making. But change and creativity and new visions will not emerge out of the obsolete, redundant and failed authoritarianism of the few insane leaders. A reflection on the on-going wars and resulting destructions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Arab Peninsula, Israel and Palestine clearly demonstrate leadership madness, insanity and aggression to the principles and norms of the UNO charter and human rights values guaranteed for peace, security and co-existence. The consequences of Man’s cruelty to Man confirm how closely the Western leaders collaborate with the oil-pumping Arab dictatorial regimes and others so called democracies to betray the interest of the global community.  The discovery of oil appears to be a conspiracy to undermine the Arab culture and civilization. The Arab world without oil were people of vision, knowledge and civilization but the oil transitory illusion of prosperity has spoiled and dehumanized the modern Arab minds and souls. They are glued to a treacherous sense of materialism that lacks rational support. The Arab rulers uplifted by the US led militarization in return for oil supplies are fast becoming victims of their own greed and tragedies, and soon they will be gone with the wind as did Ghaddafi, Hosni Mubarak, Saleh Abdullah and very soon Basahr al-Assad too, currently the entrenched Syrian authoritarian bug, making rooms for the US-Britain to assume direct control of the oil and sovereignty gimmick across the Arabian landscape. To challenge the deafening silence of the global warlords for sustainable global peace and security, the mankind must find ways and means to look beyond the obvious and dreadful horizons dominated by the few warlords and continued to be plagued with massacres, barbarity against human culture and civilizations, destruction of the habitats and natural environment as if there were no rational being and people of Reason populating the God-given splendid and evolving Universe. The informed and mature global community looks towards those thinkers, educated and honest proactive leaders enriched with coherent unity of moral, spiritual and intellectual visions and abilities to be instrumental to rescue it from the planned encroachment of the few Western warlords.

For the sole purpose of winning another term of office, Obama appears blindfolded by the political strategists to view the interests of the masters of military-industrial complex in Washington. As Robert Dreyfusss observed how Obama is self-delusional in all of his political imagination: :  “If you look at every public statement that I’ve made over the last year and a half, it has been a constant reaffirmation of the special relationship between the United States and Israel, that our commitment to Israel’s security has been unwavering. And in fact, there aren’t any concrete policies that you could point to that would contradict that.”

President Obama, you desperately NEED a self- analysis, self reflection and an inner connection to your conscience, if you do not feel disturbed by some of the latest atrocities of your soldiers under your command. The essence of time and intelligent leadership calls for RETHINKING to be a President of Conscious and President of Change, if facts on the ground warrant a change, you should go for the facts to make a Navigational Change, not fantasies craved by defeated strategists and warmongers.  You continued to be encircled by the wrong advisors - warmongers, not by realist thinkers and intellectuals who can help you to understand the pain and anguish of the larger mankind. In global imagery, you are fast becoming a hopeless person lacking moral and intellectual credibility. You are the Commander-in-Chief of the USA armed forces, and if you see the mirror, it is becoming obvious, America by siding with the warmongers, it has lost moral identity, intellectual and political strength, it is exhaustive and broken in all major domains and moving directions – a candidate to be replaced by the course of history by another nation or group of new emerging nations. You are killing people all over the globe - the large scale massacres of the innocent civilians in Afghanistan, daily drone strikes and killing of innocent civilians in Waziristan-Pakistan, US planned militarized and sectarian divided Iraq, insanity overtaking rationality, and a war without rational meaning and purpose, you are a war president, not a peace president.  Time and opportunities lost are never regained. History will judge you by your actions, not by your claims.

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(Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest: Global Peace and Conflict Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New Thinking. Lambert Publishing Germany-May,2012)

        August 28, 2012            by legitgov

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Ohio Democratic officials fired for attempt to extend early voting 28 Aug 2012 Two Democratic officials in Ohio, a key battleground state and huge electoral prize in the November 6 presidential election, were fired for trying to extend early voting to weekends in defiance of a state ban, officials said on Tuesday. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, issued a directive earlier this month that the hours for early in-person voting should be consistent throughout the state, where voting rules are a hot-button issue. [Notice that Barack Obama is *silent* on this issue? He's fine with a RMoney victory, since their policies, with the exception of cultural issues such as abortion, are virtually the same -- slumming with Monsanto and Goldman Sachs; deploying killer drones; supporting the PATRIOT Act; implementing detention without trial; engaging in endless wars for ExxonMobil and Blackwater; slashing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to pay contractors to pretend to train police forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- etc. --LRP]

Barack Obama has destroyed the future of America in order to improve his chances of winning the next election.  Under Obama, 5.3 trillion dollars has been ruthlessly stolen from our children and our grandchildren.  That money has been used to pump up the debt-fueled false prosperity that we have been experiencing.  When the U.S. government borrows money that it does not have from someone else (such as China) and spends that money into the economy it is going to make our economic numbers look better.  Even if the government spends that money on incredibly stupid things, it still gets into the hands of average Americans who in turn spend that money on food, gas, clothes, etc.  If we were to go back and take that extra 5.3 trillion dollars out of the U.S. economy, I guarantee you that we would be in a rip-roaring depression right now.  We would look a lot like Greece at this point.  For several years Greece has been raising taxes and cutting government spending in an attempt to balance the budget and these austerity measures have resulted in an unemployment rate of over 23 percent and an economy that has contracted by close to 25 percent.  Most Americans don't want to go through pain like that so they are okay with continuing to financially rape our children and our grandchildren.  Just imagine how you would feel if your parents died tomorrow and you found out that they had left you with a million dollar debt that you were legally obligated to pay off.  How would you feel, knowing that you had just been sold into debt slavery for the rest of your life?  Well, that is how our children and our grandchildren are going to feel.  We are destroying the greatest economic machine the world has ever seen, we are accumulating the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the planet, and the coming economic collapse that we have caused is going to wipe out the promising future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have.  If they get the chance, future generations of Americans will curse us bitterly and will spit on our graves.  What we are doing to our children and our grandchildren is the kind of stuff that horror movies are made of.  You should be ashamed of yourself America.

The federal budget deficit for 2012 will be larger than the entire U.S. national debt was 30 years ago.  In 1982 Ronald Reagan was in the White House and the U.S. national debt was considered to be a tremendous national crisis.  But somehow we have allowed our national debt to grow from about a trillion dollars back then to approximately $16,000,000,000,000 today.

By the end of Obama's first term, the U.S. national debt will have grown more than it did from the time that George Washington became president to the time that George W. Bush became president.

That is hard to believe.

Obama is going to outdo all the presidents from George Washington through Bill Clinton in just one term.

Amazing.

At this point, the U.S. national debt is more than 22 times larger than it was when Jimmy Carter became president.

This has allowed us to enjoy a standard of living far beyond what we deserved to.  We have stolen from the future to make the present more pleasant.

But hardly anybody wants the party to end.  Especially not our Congress critters - they are living like kings and queens at our expense.  Our "representatives" in Washington D.C. love to give speeches about being "financially responsible", but most of them never take any serious action about the debt because the way things are working now has been incredibly good to them.

And the truth is that both political parties have been responsible.  In 2010, Republicans took control of the House of Representatives with a clear mandate to get government spending under control.  Not a single penny of government money can be spent without their permission.  But since they took control, the U.S. national debt has increased by another 1.8 trillion dollars.

At this point, this current Congress (controlled by both Republicans and Democrats) has added more to the national debt than the first 97 Congresses combined.

We expect this kind of nonsense from the Democrats, but the Republicans are supposed to know better.

Of course our entire financial system is designed to permanently entrap our federal government in an endless spiral of debt, but neither political party ever talks about that.

Sadly, the U.S. national debt is now more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was first created.

But we never hear about the link between the Federal Reserve and our national debt from either political party or on the mainstream news.

So most Americans do not even realize that our system is designed to create government debt.

It is absolutely disgusting.

We say that we care about our kids, and yet we are passing down a $16,000,000,000,000 debt to them.

Talk about child abuse.

Most people have a really hard time grasping how much money 16 trillion dollars actually is.

If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

And it would take you more than half a million years to spend 16 trillion dollars.

This is a debt that is impossible to pay back.  Just look at how it has exploded over the past 40 years....

In a previous article I discussed the distressing rate at which our debt is growing....

It took more than 200 years for the U.S. national debt to reach 1 trillion dollars.  In 1986, the U.S. national debt reached 2 trillion dollars.  In 1992, the U.S. national debt reached 4 trillion dollars.  In 2005, the U.S. national debt doubled again and reached 8 trillion dollars.  Now the U.S. national debt is about to cross the 16 trillion dollar mark.  How long can this kind of exponential growth go on?

If we can't even slow down the growth of our debt, how do we ever expect to repay a single penny?

The sad truth is that we aren't ever going to start paying down our debt.  We have gotten to the point where if we take our foot off the debt accelerator we plunge directly into a depression and the entire system collapses.  It is like a really sick version of the movie "Speed".

Where is Keanu Reeves when you need him?

Since Barack Obama entered the White House, he has approved a whole host of measures that have been good for the economy in the short-term.  TARP, the stimulus packages, the auto industry bailout and the payroll tax cut are just a few examples.

Barack Obama has wanted to do everything he possibly can to stimulate the economy in the short-term so that he can win again in 2012.

But what about the future?

Barack Obama could not care less about the future.  He is just like so many of our other politicians.  He is blinded by selfish ambition.

Since Barack Obama became president, the U.S. national debt has increased by an average of more than $64,000 per taxpayer.

Are you willing to write a check for your share?

No?

Oh, let's just pass this horrific debt on to our children, right?

The path that we are on as a nation cannot go on too much longer.  The truth is that we are headed for financial oblivion.

A recently revised IMF policy paper entitled “An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: Who Will Pay and How?” projects that U.S. government debt will rise to about 400 percent of GDP by the year 2050.

Of course we will never get to the point.  Our financial system will collapse long before then.

Sadly, the United States already has more government debt per capita than Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain does.

So why are we not like Greece or Spain yet?

Well, it is because we are still able to borrow huge piles of money very, very cheaply.

But at some point that will come to an end, and when it does the consequences are going to be nightmarish.

Historically, the interest rate on 10 year U.S. Treasuries has averaged 6.68 percent.  If the average rate of interest on U.S. debt rose to that level today, we would be paying more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt.

And when you consider our future unfunded liabilities things get even more frightening.

According to Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, the "fiscal gap" is "the present value difference between projected future spending and revenue".  His calculations have led him to the conclusion that the United States is facing a fiscal gap of 222 trillion dollars.

And this gap is rising at a breathtaking pace.

The following is an excerpt from a recent article co-authored by Kotlikoff....

In 2007, the first year the CBO produced the Alternative Fiscal Scenario, the gap, by our reckoning, stood at $175 trillion. By 2009, when the CBO began reporting the AFS annually, the gap was $184 trillion. In 2010, it was $202 trillion, followed by $211 trillion in 2011 and $222 trillion in 2012.

But if we interrupt this debt cycle we immediately go into a depression.

We are a debt addict that will die without more debt.

Meanwhile, our national ability to produce wealth is going down the toilet.

All over the country businesses are shutting down, factories are being closed and millions of jobs are being sent overseas.

As I wrote about the other day, American families are steadily getting poorer.  The middle class is shrinking and the tax base is shriveling up.

Many Americans end up flat broke at the end of their lives these days.  In fact, one study found that nearly half of all retirees end up with $10,000 or less when they die.

So where is all of the money for servicing this gigantic national debt going to come from?

Even if Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.

So what is the solution?

If we keep spending money like this we are doomed, but if we stop spending money like this we are doomed.

And debt is not just a problem that the federal government is facing.

Posted below is a chart that shows the growth of all forms of debt in the United States over the past several decades.  40 years ago, there was less than 2 trillion dollars of total debt owed in the United States.  Now there is nearly 55 trillion dollars of debt owed.  This generation has destroyed the future and has set the stage for an unprecedented economic collapse.  Shame on you America....

 

 

The United States has collapsed economically, socially, politically, legally, constitutionally, and environmentally. The country that exists today is not even a shell of the country into which I was born. In this article I will deal with America’s economic collapse. In subsequent articles, i will deal with other aspects of American collapse.
Economically, America has descended into poverty. As Peter Edelman says, “Low-wage work is pandemic.” Today in “freedom and democracy” America, “the world’s only superpower,” one fourth of the work force is employed in jobs that pay less than $22,000, the poverty line for a family of four. Some of these lowly-paid persons are young college graduates, burdened by education loans, who share housing with three or four others in the same desperate situation. Other of these persons are single parents only one medical problem or lost job away from homelessness.
Others might be Ph.D.s teaching at universities as adjunct professors for $10,000 per year or less. Education is still touted as the way out of poverty, but increasingly is a path into poverty or into enlistments into the military services.
Edelman, who studies these issues, reports that 20.5 million Americans have incomes less than $9,500 per year, which is half of the poverty definition for a family of three.
There are six million Americans whose only income is food stamps. That means that there are six million Americans who live on the streets or under bridges or in the homes of relatives or friends. Hard-hearted Republicans continue to rail at welfare, but Edelman says, “basically welfare is gone.”
In my opinion as an economist, the official poverty line is long out of date. The prospect of three people living on $19,000 per year is farfetched. Considering the prices of rent, electricity, water, bread and fast food, one person cannot live in the US on $6,333.33 per year. In Thailand, perhaps, until the dollar collapses, it might be done, but not in the US.
As Dan Ariely (Duke University) and Mike Norton (Harvard University) have shown empirically, 40% of the US population, the 40% less well off, own 0.3%, that is, three-tenths of one percent, of America’s personal wealth. Who owns the other 99.7%? The top 20% have 84% of the country’s wealth. Those Americans in the third and fourth quintiles--essentially America’s middle class--have only 15.7% of the nation’s wealth. Such an unequal distribution of income is unprecedented in the economically developed world.
In my day, confronted with such disparity in the distribution of income and wealth, a disparity that obviously poses a dramatic problem for economic policy, political stability, and the macro management of the economy, Democrats would have demanded corrections, and Republicans would have reluctantly agreed.
But not today. Both political parties whore for money.
The Republicans believe that the suffering of poor Americans is not helping the rich enough. Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney are committed to abolishing every program that addresses needs of what Republicans deride as “useless eaters.”
The “useless eaters” are the working poor and the former middle class whose jobs were offshored so that corporate executives could receive multi-millions of dollars in performance pay compensation and their shareholders could make millions of dollars on capital gains. While a handful of executives enjoy yachts and Playboy playmates, tens of millions of Americans barely get by.
In political propaganda, the “useless eaters” are not merely a burden on society and the rich. They are leeches who force honest taxpayers to pay for their many hours of comfortable leisure enjoying life, watching sports events, and fishing in trout streams, while they push around their belongings in grocery baskets or sell their bodies for the next MacDonald burger.
The concentration of wealth and power in the US today is far beyond anything my graduate economic professors could image in the 1960s. At four of the world’s best universities that I attended, the opinion was that competition in the free market would prevent great disparities in the distribution of income and wealth. As I was to learn, this belief was based on an ideology, not on reality.
Congress, acting on this erroneous belief in free market perfection, deregulated the US economy in order to create a free market. The immediate consequence was resort to every previous illegal action to monopolize, to commit financial and other fraud, to destroy the productive basis of American consumer incomes, and to redirect income and wealth to the one percent.
The “democratic” Clinton administration, like the Bush and Obama administrations, was suborned by free market ideology. The Clinton sell-outs to Big Money essentially abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children. But this sell-out of struggling Americans was not enough to satisfy the Republican Party. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan want to cut or abolish every program that cushions poverty-stricken Americans from starvation and homelessness.
Republicans claim that the only reason Americans are in need is because the government uses taxpayers’ money to subsidize Americans who are unwilling to work. As Republicans see it, while we hard-workers sacrifice our leisure and time with our families, the welfare rabble enjoy the leisure that our tax dollars provide them.
This <snip>-eyed belief, on top of corporate CEOs maximizing their incomes by offshoring the middle class jobs of millions of Americans, has left Americans in poverty and cities, counties, states, and the federal government without a tax base, resulting in bankruptcies at the state and local level and massive budget deficits at the federal level that threaten the value of the dollar and its role as reserve currency.
The economic destruction of America benefitted the mega-rich with multi-billions of dollars with which to enjoy life and its high-priced accompaniments wherever the mega-rich wish. Meanwhile, away from the French Rivera, Homeland Security is collecting sufficient ammunition to keep dispossessed Americans under control.

 

            Daniel Doherty       

 

            Daniel Doherty       

First Posted August 28, 2011 as:

“Obama’s Legacy: A Failed Recovery & Double-Dip Recession”

I wrote the material that follows a year ago.  I missed the mark, since the continued Payroll Tax Holidays, the Fed’s policies and the strength in the equity markets (or weakness in the Eurozone) has allowed the USA to avoid the technical double-dip recession. Instead we have an election year where growth will average around 2%, and the economy has struggled to create enough net new jobs to simply keep up with workforce growth.

Virtually every measurable indicator of the economy screams “failure,” and yet, Barack Obama travels across the USA campaigning on the “progress” he imagines—that few Americans can feel or enjoy. 

I am posting what I wrote  year ago, to give the critics another chance to nitpick my economics and totally ignore reality. America is in trouble–financially, socially, internationally, and politically.  While Congress gets a share of the blame, it is the foremost principle of leadership that the leader, during a crisis, pulls together the factions and finds solutions, and then implements them. Unless the leader is out of ideas, because few of the old ones have worked—or unless he is clueless–and was unqualified for the job he holds in the first place.

It will be up to the American people to decide this latter point, in just eleven weeks.  May God bless America and help the American people make the right choices in the ballot box.

Here is the prior post, in its entirety:

There will be no significant recovery in the United States of America while Barack Obama is President.  The evidence is overwhelming:  everything Obama has tried to fuel a recovery (with his Democratic allies in Congress) has failed.  Statistics claiming jobs saved by the stimulus package were mostly fiction, and cost American taxpayers about $275,000 each.  Nearly 2-1/2 million fewer Americans have jobs than before the stimulus.

Barack Obama has been President for 30 months—2-1/2 years. He spent the first year obsessed with passing Obamacare, a program that doesn’t create jobs, but might destroy a lot of them.  He “bailed out” GM, but many believe that his interference didn’t save GM; it merely cost taxpayers an extra $15-20 billion, and stole from legitimate investors to buy off the UAW.  His broken campaign promises are too numerous to list.  At some point, his statute of limitations on blaming Bush runs out.  The latest joke is that the White House is that named the location of East Coast earthquake near DC “Bush’s Fault.”

Obama himself said, “…that after three years, if the economy wasn’t fixed he should be a one-term president.”

Clearly the economic malaise started on George W. Bush’s watch.  Its causes will be argued for decades, but most of them are traceable to irresponsible lending and excessive spending— both by government and the American people.  The trouble that started before 2008 is directly traceable to actions (or inactions) of Bush and GOP allies in Congress.  They spent America into the start of the current deficit during his eight years in the White House.

But that was then, and this is now. Since Obama took office the situation has gotten much, much worse. Obama has run up the deficit at more than twice the rate Bush did. During the first quarter of 2011, the US economy “barely grew” —at 0.4%—that was followed by second quarter’s “anemic growth” of 1%.  This was during the period when the Obama recovery was supposed to be well underway.  Employment data is unremittingly terrible:  new jobless claims are stuck at 400,000+/- each month, with job creation well below what it takes just to absorb new workforce entrants.  More Americans have been unemployed longer than ever in our history.  And looking ahead, the news is not good.

This is Obama’s failed American recovery, and in the near future, Obama’s impending double-dip recession (thanks in no small part to his three consecutive years with Trillion-dollar in deficits that have inflated the national deficit to soaring heights—$14+ Trillion.)  That legacy clearly belongs to President Barack Obama and with help from the Congress led by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi during 2008-2010.   Thanks to them, our country hasn’t even had a budget since Obama took office. The latest Obama Blame Finger pointing focuses on the “Tea Party” as “extremists” who have a problem with astronomical deficits as far as the eye can see.  (Pointing at Bush is getting a little old since he’s been out of office for 2-1/2 years).  Obama needs a new scapegoat.  The problem with the Tea Party is that it is like the child in the fairy tale, “The Emperors New Clothes.” The child is reviled for pointing out that the emperor is naked.  Thus, the Tea Party is not wrong, just unwelcome.

Now Obama also wants to point the Blame Finger at the GOP House for the downgrade in the US debt rating by Standard and Poor’s.  It seems that he believes that everyone else is to blame but him. That downgrade was predestined by the combination of irresponsible spending and Obama’s clueless attempts to throw money at a recovery to no avail.  Spending $1.50 for every dollar of revenue, running trillion dollar annual deficits is reason enough for a downgrade in the US debt rating.

Face it folks:  This is Obama’s failed recovery. And if (or when) it comes to pass, this “double-dip” recession (just around the corner) is his too.

Make no mistake, there IS plenty of blame to go around.  About 75% of Americans are fed up with both Obama and Congress.   The conservative and liberal factions of the House and Senate behaved badly in the recent debt ceiling negotiation.  President Obama wanted to stay above the fray so he provided no leadership. He didn’t even know how to bring the opposing viewpoints together.  He talked about bi-partisanship and consensus, but his actions disproved his words.

Until the president saw an impending disaster, he sat on the sidelines, afraid to do anything that might hinder his reelection campaign.  Then, when his intervention didn’t help, and arguably hurt the progress, he grew impatient, petulant and angry.

John Boehner, however, did an admirable job trying to build a compromise deal on the debt ceiling, and get his own Caucus to support such a plan.  Except, Obama was attacked by his liberal base for even considering the “grand bargain,” so he came in and dumped another “raise taxes more” demand on Boehner.  I’d have walked out too, which Boehner was right to do.

But at least they were arguing about the right thing: how much to cut spending and how.

The Tea Party’s desire for fiscal responsibility is right, but it doesn’t mean that tax revenue can’t be increased.  It can; how it’s done is what matters.  The tax code desperately needs to be restructured.  Simply digging in on old positions doesn’t help; it hurts.  The goal is to “get the country working again,” and grow our way out of this mess.

The one phrase of President Obama’s that I agree with is “Country First.”  But John Boehner was the one who tried his best to put “Country First.”  If Obama truly chooses that as his 2012 campaign slogan, it will reek of hypocrisy.

If the members of Congress would put 1) country first, 2) constituents wishes next, and 3) personal agendas last, they might be able to work together to find a way out of this mess.

What happens in the Super-Committee of Twelve will be both revealing and predictive.  Either America’s Congressional leaders will—or won’t—put “country first” and try to find common ground and reasonable compromises to lead America out of this mess.

Whatever happens, this failed recovery and impending recession belong to President Barack Obama.  His condescending explanations of why “we Americans” don’t get it, how “this will take a long time,” this recovery, and his “class warfare” about “millionaires and billionaires” versus the “common folk” are all wearing thin. This kind of rhetoric won’t solve America’s problems.   It takes strong, informed, and experienced leadership to get through a mess like this one. We need a fixer, not a hypocritical speechmaker in the White House.  Barack Obama is not that man.  A wise man once told me, “The person who got you into a problem is seldom the one who will get you out of it.” That’s why there will be no recovery on Obama’s watch, but there could be a double-dip recession.