Howard Stern: Democratic Party Is Communist

In 2008 Howard Stern was right (also see discussion on Bizpac Review): The Democratic Party is communist.  As Americans confront the failure of their political system, many are unable to assess that this is a gangster-ruled land.  Stern had the imagination, but only when the government directly affected his own dealings concerning the merger of Sirius Communications and XM Radio.  The Cato Institute subsequently pointed out that the FCC's authority over mergers should be ended; the communists in Washington lack the competence or honesty to regulate economic behavior.  The merger that the FCC later permitted had so many requirements that the new technology will likely be impeded for years.

Like the Germans under Hitler, Americans are not yet suffering from tyranny that they have put in power.  The Germans changed their minds about totalitarianism when they lost the war, and their own lives and futures were sharply reduced. It is when their own interests are directly threatened that Americans may decide that liberty is preferable to communism. Until then expect declines in the American economy and standard of living.  Stern states that he had voted for Hillary Clinton and Al Gore; it wasn't until his own interests were harmed that he questioned his pattern of voting for totalitarians.

Because of the might of the once-free American economy, the ill effects of American communism have taken the form of stagnation rather than decline.  Over time, though, stagnation will become decline.

The dollar may strengthen in the coming weeks, and there may be a decline in the stock market, but I don't think that the stock market will fall sharply in the near future.  The reason is that due to monetary expansion interest rates may take years to increase, and inflation awaits a shift in global support for the dollar. That also may take years.  Eventually, there will be dollar depreciation--inflation--and real wages will decline rather than stagnate. The massive stimulus that nourishes the current anemic American economy will ultimately turn into monetary inflation.  The increasing population will not be able to proportionately expand its output.

At that point I see either more extreme totalitarian steps or a call for more freedom.   There is little reason for optimism.  Ultimately, ownership of hard assets may protect Americans, but there is no reason to feel safe becaue the future America will likely be one where private property is not safe.  Franklin Roosevelt used government violence to take possession of privately held gold; there is no reason to think that private property, especially outside the private property of government cronies, is safe in the United States.

Not a Wonderful Life: Today's Democrats and Republicans Are Yesterday's Brown Shirts

Both Democrats and Republicans harass me when I question either. Obama's brown shirted followers have repeatedly called me names such as "racist." As The New York Sun reported in 2008, several of Obama's followers maliciously reported my blog as spam, causing Google to shut it down for a number of days.In a parallel display of rigid intolerance, today a GOP supporter called me names for writing earlier that, absent a Paul, Johnson or other small government 2012 presidential nominee, I would vote Libertarian in the hopes of a split government.  The Republican response is as authoritarian as the Democratic one. 

To quote History Learning.com, one week before the 1932 election Hitler burned down the Reichstag, the German parliament. He convinced President Hindenburg to give him an emergency powers law more extreme than those that the Patriot Act grants the American president: the Law for the Protection of the People and the State. Hitler had claimed that communists had burned down the Reichstag, and he blamed Marianus van der Lubbe for doing so.   The law banned the Communists and Socialists from taking part in the 1932 election, ensuring a Nazi election victory.  The storm troopers (Sturmabteilung, SA, or brown shirts) beat up Hitler's opponents.  Because a majority, of Germans had voted against Hitler (which was his reason for forestalling an open election in 1932), Hitler had to use intimidation to maintain power.

The Democrats and Republicans do not need to burn down Congress because there is already a one party system in the United States.  The Stalinist mass media has done Obama's and Romney's brown shirting for them.   As Georg Lukacs has pointed out, Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and today's America share similarities. Their governments reflect national socialist forms.  Due to the propaganda of The New York Times and left wing academics, students are taught that Hitler's system was fascism rather than National Socialism.  In fact, today's Sweden has a nationalist socialist system, as does the US to a lesser degree.  Hitler's National Socialism was conceptually similar to Stalin's socialism in one country, and both were similar to Theodore Roosevelt's Progressivism.  Both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt aimed to cartelize American industry; the American system under Roosevelt's National Recovery Act, had the Supreme Court not declared it unconstitutional, would have been more like Mussolini's fascism than Hitler's or Stalin's system, but it would have hastened the long term trend toward centralization of power.

The centralization of the monetary system and Wall Street's control of the legacy media have shored up America's socialism in one country.  Today, an elite led by George Soros and Barack Obama increasingly favor an internationalist socialism to a nationalist one. Obama and his backers at The New York Times may be more like Trotsky than Stalin, to the distaste of Stalinists like Donald Trump. The system has guaranteed the transfer of wealth from  productive and innovative Americans to Wall Street and government, accelerating the 19th century's gradual trend toward centralization.  The 19th century trend would not have occurred to the same degree without the Civil War and state subsidies to the railroads.  Centralization permitted economic gains for less than a century, but did so by quelling twin innovative engines: laissez faire capitalism and decentralized government. 

Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, which I showed to my senior seminar class yesterday,  implies that concentrated wealth is potentially totalitarian. As Uncle Billy says to Mr. Potter before he hands him the $8,000 meant for deposit in Mr. Potter's bank, "Not every heel was in Japan and Germany." 

What is remarkable about the American descent into national socialism is not that The New York Times supports it.  Wall Street, starting with the Ochs Sulzbergers and Rupert Murdoch, owns the media, and its writers and reporters are the products of America's elite socialist-in-one-country cum internationalist socialist education system.  What is remarkable is that apparently a majority of Americans support a system that has harmed them economically, and that has reduced the growth in their standard of living so that they are earning less than one half of what they would have earned under laisser faire.

Washington's War on Men

Wall Street Journal editor David Wessel says on this video, which I picked up from Market Watch, that even when the economy recovers Larry Summers expects one in six men to remain permanently unemployed. This would likely be among the less educated and lower income.  In another Market Watch article Eleanore Goldberg points out that single women purchasing homes outnumber single men purchasing homes two to one.

The Federal Reserve Bank's policies have harmed low-wage workers, squeezing their pay through inflation while subsidizing investment and commercial banks through monetary creation.  I am not so clear why women should be outperforming men in America's declining economy, declining because finance has been massively subsidized at the expense of innovation and hard work.

Men need to make more efforts to learn marketable skills, obviously.  Perhaps false expectations have deluded many men, whereas women have tended to assume that they are at a disadvantage and so tried harder.  America increasingly strikes me as a place much less desirable in which to live than it was several decades ago when, say, I entered college.  I did not dream that so much decline would occur so fast.  Big government and a socialized economy, the policies that American universities advocate, have hammered America into the dust.

Americans need to wake up to the decline and end the socialism with which Washington has harmed so many.

Jim Crum on the Greek Welfare State: Civic Not Official Corruption Leads to Decline

I wonder how long it will be before we see similar kinds of riots in our more civilly corrupt states like New York, California and Illinois.  Jim Crum writes:

 

I watched with interest the riots going on in Athens and Thessaloniki this morning.  During interviews there were the typical efforts to blame corrupt politicians. Is this correct?  The answer is both yes and no.Official corruption did not lead to this.  Civic corruption did.

 

Apparently, this unavoidable and quite profound irony is lost on thousands of Greeks and nearly every reporter.The welfare state corrupts both the spirit and the soul.   Left in place long enough and the fires of industry will also slowly die out.  

 

The country is financially exhausted due to bloated public unions that run nearly everything from hospitals, to taxis, to cleaning services.  Such unions punished hard work and rewarded poor behavior.  Left unchecked for over a generation, it has led to enormous misallocation of resources that have literally drained the treasury of money and the national psyche of civic virtue.

 

Now the piper has called the tune that no one wishes to dance to.Sadly there seems to be an accepted concept that there is a right to be supported by someone else.  But we are now seeing what happens when socialism “runs out of other people’s money”.  It’s right there on our TV screens, rampaging through the streets of Athens.

 

So far, those rioting and the political liberals seem willfully ignorant of the forces at work.How long will it be until they wake up?

America in Economic Decline

Erich Deagostino has forwarded a link to a Yahoo! news report that suggests that America is heading down the same road as Greece, which is nearing bankruptcy. The report notes that:

"As with Greece, America's national debt has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past decade, to the point where it threatens to swamp overall economic output. And in the U.S., as in Greece, a large portion of that debt is owed to foreign investors."

The aggressive Democratic health care socialization push will cause us to stumble further down this road.

There is a long history of cries about excessive borrowing's leading to economic crisis that have turned out not to be true. The history goes back to the 18th century. But of course, it sometimes does turn out to be true. American has defaulted on its loans before. The nation issued a currency called the Continental to finance the Revolutionary War and after the War the Continental turned out to be worthless. People who held it were defrauded. America invented modern hyper-inflation along with democracy. In response, the 19th century saw the development of hard money attitudes, which were viewed as benevolent and pro-labor. In the twentieth century labor unions' leaders realized that they could advance themselves by advocating inflationary policies that benefit Wall Street and harm their membership. In no small part as a result, labor union membership has consistently fallen. Why should workers pay dues to support leaders who betray them?

The claim that America is too big to fail should seem absurd now that we have witnessed General Motors' failure. For much of my life, GM was the largest corporation in the world and few could have imagined its failure, at least until the mid 1970s. The claim that China and other countries "need us" may be true, but eventually some will wake up to the fact that the Emperor is a pauper and will pull out, leading to a dollar crisis.

Greek labor unions are striking. But one cannot derive water from a stone, and the irrational strikes will only make matters worse.

In response to mounting American and European instability, Marc Faber on Kitco radio recommends gold, US real estate, developing countries' stocks like India and Brazil and cash. Faber says that a crash in China cannot be ruled out so that there is no rush to go into developing countries' stocks. Also, US real estate may not have much further to fall in his opinion. He says up to twenty percent further. I'm not sure of that, but given Congress's commitment to prop up real estate and stock prices, he may be right. I doubt that real estate prices could be maintained were this a market economy. But that is true of all assets.

In the meantime I have begun to have thoughts of an exit strategy as I am concerned that the US will increasingly become totalitarian under Obama and the Democratic Party. Were I slightly wealthier I would buy land in the Bahamas. Unfortunately, on a professor's salary I have to be content with hard asset investments and my house. Without a stable monetary system and with a system of economic redistribution whereby the privileged benefit from Congress's and the states' theories of beneficence, which inevitably loot those who work hard and are criminal in substance, has the American dream died?

Jim Crum on American Economic Collapse

Jim Crum of Chicago, who has corresponded frequently with me since the early days of the Obama birth certificate controversy, has published his first article on New Media Journal. Jim is a truly patriotic citizen who claims that freedom will withstand an economic collapse. I think he is right. Jim would like to live in a town called "Theory" because everything the Democrats and Republicrats have done works in theory but not in reality.

Jim notes:

"The trajectory we travel is perfectly clear, it is in the wrong direction, and it raises serious questions as to whether we can pull the nose up on this thing.

"If we cannot exorcise financial rot, moral decay, waste and fraud from our midst, circumstances will force it upon us...

"Liberty can survive -even flourish- in such circumstances as it does not require material wealth to function. Yet, it does require stability and adherence to basic rules and standards of conduct. An economic implosion we could survive, provided that it did not rend the social contract we follow. A very dicey game of chicken we are playing right now..."