411 Renaissance

Archive for May, 2010

Why are some religious figures ‘soft’ on oppressors?

A window into recent mainstream church history is a window into an ongoing moral ambivalence among ‘modern’ church leaders.

This linked article, by F. J H. McDonnell, “Embracing the Tormentors” should be required reading in ANY seminary … and for you and me. <http://spectator.org/archives/2010/05/25/embracing-the-tormentors-the-h>

Add comment May 26th, 2010

Dickens Redux – Ghost of the Grinch

Britain is Our Future Unless….
To say that the American public is disenchanted with its political leadership is the understatement of the decade. If you doubt this, check in at the Rasmussen polling organization (http://www.rasmussenreports.com) where reliable numbers have been consistently telling us that.

For example, today our president’s disapproval rating is 56% and has not been below 50% since 11-16-09. The Congress fares even worse. What is the percentage of Americans who do not think the congress knows what it’s doing with respect to the economy? 72%. What is the percentage of Americans who now favor repeal of the president’s health care plan? 63%.

The popular outrage and distrust is not the result of some irresponsible demagoguery. Quite to the contrary: Uniquely armed with actual information, these Americans have bypassed the demagogues, gotten to the raw data and have noticed something that the emperors have tried to hide, camouflage and explain away. Here’s the dirty little non-secret — We cannot afford to fund the ambitious agendas of modern liberal government. The game is up.

A back of the envelope snapshot of the state of 2010 federal spending compared to actual revenue quickly reveals that 20 of every 100 dollars spent by the deferral government is borrowed. Further, the total national debt (remember – it grows with each annual deficit) expressed as a percentage of our nation’s total domestic product is almost 60% and trending rapidly to 100%.

The current national debt is about 12.9 trillion (http://www.federalbudget.com/), while the 2010 current federal budget, including the part relying on borrowed money, is only about 3.6 trillion.

This means that the US federal government already owes more that 3.58 times as much as it spends in one year. And that is almost 60% of what all of us, individually and corporately make in a year (which, crudely speaking, is what is meant by the GNP).

This isn’t just our situation. Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Britain, France and the USA are lined up in a failure chain. The iron laws of economics are presenting to each of these sovereign states only two choices:

Total economic collapse or

A deeply unpopular total retreat from their toxic borrowing addiction.

The illusion that we – or anyone else – can continue to borrow, while continuing to suck capital out of the private sector and just “grow our way” out of this mess, has now graduated to the status of full-on delusion.

Our British friends are like the ghost of a bleak Christmas future in the Dickens novel. That is our future…unless….

The American people now host a plurality of citizens, a nominal majority that I will call the Tea Party Plus group. These are the informed citizens who have figured out our essential situation ahead of the politicians. Our government’s thirty year borrowing binge is now exposed as a Madoff Ponzi scheme writ large, one that will lead inexorably to a brutal correction.

For the grim details, you might start your research with these links.

http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/federal-spending

http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/federal-revenue

http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/contents

THIS IS WHY NO SINGLE LEADER HAS EMERGED FROM THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT.

“You need someone to say, ‘I will do the right thing and everyone will hate me.’ ”

New York Times

Business Page

In Europe, Britain May Face Largest Debt Hurdle

By Landon Thomas Jr.

Published: May 24, 2010

“Prime Minister David Cameron has talked boldly of closing a British budget deficit now equal to 11 percent of its gross domestic product. But he also has said that he will allow health spending to outpace inflation, continuing a trend started by the Labour government that has doubled the cost of the government’s elephantine National Health Service since 2000. [My emphasis added.]

“’You need a martyr to cut this type of deficit,’ said Andrew Lilico, chief economist at Policy Exchange, a right-leaning London research group, who has argued that quick and immediate spending cuts would actually hasten economic recovery rather than derail it.

‘You need someone to say, I will do the right thing and everyone will hate me. ‘”

“In a recent report, the International Monetary Fund warned that the countries that would have to make the biggest sacrifices in spending cuts and tax increases to return to pre-crisis levels of indebtedness — Britain, France, Ireland, Spain and the United States — also face the biggest increase in spending demands. These are driven by the rising number of the elderly, thus making the cuts all the harder to impose.”

Link to the full piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/business/global/25debt.html?ref=todayspaper

Are we Americans different than the Europeans? We are not. Moreover, we cannot be bailed out.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/

THE STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS

It all boils down to this. Any viable working social order requires that the great majority of able adults need to be economically productive.

When well-meaning social programs multiply, they get to a certain critical mass; programs become parasitical in effect and ultimately toxic in outcome.

A minority of highly productive individuals cannot and ultimately will not support all the rest.

Here are some of the key elements: Labor union contracts, bureaucratic employment rules, generous benefits for able bodied non-productive persons, defined benefit, underfunded pensions, political feedback loops between benefited groups and vote-buying politicians; all these forces and more have conspired to create a rigid politically tangled economic system.

Perversely, one could not have set out to design a system more resistant to rational corrective change. As a result, a catastrophic crash followed by social unrest becomes increasingly likely. Greek riots in LA?

This is not to say that our hallowed social benefit systems were not inspired by well meaning policy objectives. It’s just that there are real world limits. How far can any set of politicians take us into the brave new world of the cost-free entitlement society? We now have our answer. We’ve already gone a bridge too far.

The BP uncapped oil spill is a metaphor for the current administration’s paralysis during a dire period of fiscal hemorrhage. We were already deep in trouble before the new well was drilled. Capping that gusher will be as difficult and as necessary as reversing this administration’s fiscally irresponsible programs-in-place.

It is also a metaphor for our economic recovery. To the extent that America is able to emerge whole from our under-water indebtedness, it will be due to the buoyancy of our private sector business communities. At the moment, they are underfunded, and deeply anchored to a government that still thinks it can operate at great depths.

I am reminded of a recent conversation between a highly placed Chinese official and an American entrepreneur. Reportedly, this was a Chinese official (who will remained unnamed here- he is known for his aggressive role in unleashing the business community). He asked the American (in light of the Obama administration’s recent policies) , “So how do you like life under communism?”

You can’t make this stuff up.

Jay B Gaskill

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2 comments May 25th, 2010

DELAYING THE DAY OF RECKONING

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THE 411 RENAISSANCE BLOG – Ground Zero for Renaissance

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DELAY AND THEN WHAT?

POLLING INFORMATION TELLS US TO EXPECT THE GOP TO ALMOST -BUT NOT QUITE – GAIN CONTROL OF THE SENATE.

The state of play in the US Senate’s partisan composition is discussed in the following state-by-state analysis by the Rasmussen organization–

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_larry_j_sabato/senate_shakeup_moving_through_primary_season

Given the prospect of Reid’s defeat in the bargain, the loss of the house by the democrats and an intervening war in the Middle East, a great deal will hinge on two imponderables: (1) Will POTUS be reborn as a Clintonesque triangulator? (2) What sort of democrat will replace Reid as Majority Leader?

I suspect that the ‘mediocrity principle’ will fail us. That’s the notion that things are never as good as we hope or as bad as we fear. A second principle seems more applicable.

One who keeps kicking the can down the road eventually falls down.

The open question is this: Who will get up first? Hint — Look for the ‘fire in the belly’.

I can’t recall a sufficient historical parallel. When a major failure of leadership occurs, usually – but not now – an alternate leader emerges around whom the new paradigm forms.

This is the overextended nation, living on borrowed money, borrowed time, unopened bills piling up, calls unanswered….

Meantime, the Cheerleader in Chief remains unwilling or unable to chart a path out that doesn’t commit us to more living on borrowed money, more bills to be paid and more rhetoric.

Suggestions anyone?

JBG

Add comment May 22nd, 2010

Call 911 – The Conservative Fire Truck

I believe that the reigning elites will attempt to “allow” the Fire Truck Conservatives to oust the current liberal clique and govern long enough to “responsibly” curtail some of the worst spending and borrowing excesses without fundamentally changing the fundamental power relationships.

But there is at least a 60% probability that the current elites will fail to retain control of the situation. This is much too big for control by the current elites, especially those who were “on duty” for some of the decades when the current fiscal and economic problems were neglected

More…

LINK: http://jaygaskill.com/ConservativeFireTruck.htm

Add comment May 21st, 2010

Surfing the Populist Wave

ONE WAVE , MANY SURFERS

The Tea Party Surge

Jay B Gaskill

One conservative writer, Matthew Continetti, writing on the Weekly Standard bog, is having trouble framing a single narrative from the mixed results in yesterday’s special elections. See – http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/searching-narrative .

More conservative democrats in blue-red jurisdictions (like the late John Murtha’s in Penn. 12) are running well, turncoat “moderates” (like A. Spector) are turned out, the inflamed left is still in control within the democratic sub-universe, but the Tea Party sub-universes of conservatives (think Rand Paul) are stronger than the establishment version.

Do read Continetti’s piece, then consider my take.

This is all about the catastrophic failure of elite-engendered policies that have brought this nation – and the European Union – to the very brink of fiscal collapse. In the USA, a populist electoral tradition has suddenly reawakened, for the first time without a single visible leader, and for the first time with a distinctly libertarian flavor, and also for the first time with a vastly better informed subset of populist activists.

This populist movement is powered by tech-savvy, laptop toting cohort of very smart and very angry people who are better equipped than any before them to hold the governing elites’ metaphorical feet to the fire.

All traditional politics is local, to be sure, but all re-formative change is driven by more universal concerns, with varying local expressions, much like the incoming tide washes up farther on the shallow beaches than against the cliffs.

Here is the single organizing principle: At the core of this populist movement, we can see the gathering alliance of the truly productive economic forces in this country against the parasitic and manipulative elites that have finally exposed themselves.

At the moment, this populist surge is still operating without the self awareness needed to form a viable, long term political alliance . There is a healthy skepticism within the Tea Party mindset about the cult of personality. Meantime, a cohort of timid, would-be leaders are afraid to step fully into the front of the wave. The caution of traditional politicians is predictable. No one will ride this wave without accountability.

For more insights, revisit my 2008 review of the incoming populist wave, still available – and pertinent – at http://www.jaygaskill.com/newPPP.htm .

This wave is much larger than the political class realizes. It will not go away any time soon because the structural features of fiscal failure will not go away of themselves.

More to come.

Stay tuned.

JBG

Add comment May 19th, 2010

KAGAN – UPDATED

KAGAN

She is an archetypically sharp-liberal, but funny and endearing – if you enjoy the type (as I usually have, having worked with several Kaganesque woman lawyers over the decades). And Ms. Kagan is deeply, deeply cloaked.

GO TO — http://jaygaskill.com/blog1/ AND

This piece is simultaneously posted, in printable form, on The Policy Think Site,

LINK: http://jaygaskill.com/KAGAN.htm

UPDATE. KAGAN’S CLOAK HAS BEGINNING TO SLIP. NEW CONCERNS HAVE EMERGED OVER HER AMBIVALENCE ON THE FREE SPEECH AREA. GO TO THIS LINKWHERE MY CONCERNS ARE DISCUSSED– http://jaygaskill.com/KaganRedFlag.htm

AND STAY TUNED….

Add comment May 11th, 2010

THE TIMES SQUARE BOMBER & THE TREASON VIRUS

The Treason Virus 2.0

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THE TIMES SQUARE BOMBER

By Jay B Gaskill

The article is posted at: http://jaygaskill.com/TheTreasonVirus2.0.htm

Add comment May 4th, 2010

THE ‘NUKE WHISPERER’S’ MOMENT OF TRUTH

Yesterday’s Times Square bomb car incident perfectly frames a national security discussion.

The Nuke Whisperer — Why Iran Cannot Just Be ‘Deterred’ or ‘Sanctioned’

My piece is posted on the Policy Think Site: http://jaygaskill.com/TheNukeWhisperer2.htm

And on the Human Conspiracy Blog at http://jaygaskill.com/blog3/

Add comment May 3rd, 2010

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