Screwed!

Dick Morris, Eileen McGann

• Publisher: Broadside e-books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780062196712
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

America is being Screwed!, say Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, by China, Russia, the EU, and other nations with the help of our own political and business leaders. The co-authors of nine explosive New York Times bestsellers—including Revolt!, Catastrophe, Fleeced, Outrage, and 2010: Take Back America —Morris and McGann now expose a massive global scandal that affects the lives and livelihood of every American: the undeniable truth that foreign countries are ripping America off and plundering our economy. With the unemployment rate soaring and the economic picture growing bleaker by the hour, Screwed! is a necessary wake-up call for every concerned citizen, from middle class workers and Tea Party conservatives to labor leaders and environmentalists who oppose globalism and its negative economic and environmental repercussions.

PART ONE

A WORLD WITHOUT DEMOCRACY; AMERICA WITHOUT SOVEREIGNTY

Government of the people, by the people, and for the people is on the verge of perishing from this earth. It is succumbing not to fascism or communism. It vanquished both of those formidable foes. Nor is it in danger of falling to Islamist extremism. Our increasing energy independence precludes that scenario.

Nor are we mortally threatened by dictatorships around the world. The tyrants who rule other countries are sitting, ultimately, on volcanoes that are ready to erupt at any minute. As Mubarak, Gaddafi, Milosevic, Hussein, and so many others have learned, the volcano remains quiescent for only so long. The current rulers in China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia should take note.

However, democracy is, still, under siege from its real enemy, bureaucracy: government by so-called experts. In each important sector of our lives, these experts are taking over, removing power from the hands of the governed, and always acting in what they perceive as our own best interest. But always without asking our permission.

As C. S. Lewis (quoted by Mark R. Levin in Liberty and Tyranny) pointed out, “regulation by do-gooders can be the most frightening of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” Levin describes how the moral busybodies seek to oppress us with “soft tyranny,” telling us what to do for our own good. And, as Lewis noted, they will “torment us without end” if we give them the chance.1

Look how far soft tyranny has advanced already!

We no longer control our nation’s economy. The Federal Reserve Board does that.

And we no longer control the Federal Reserve Board. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), working through the G-20 group of nations, sets the policies that the Fed is obliged to follow.

We can’t decide whether to go to war. The United Nations does that with its Russian and Chinese vetoes hanging over our head. Globalists are even trying to make the waging of a war without UN approval an international crime of aggression, and hold our leaders individually and criminally responsible if they commit it.

We don’t control our trade policies. The World Trade Organization (WTO) does that, decreeing that we must have zero tariffs and let in every import, while China rigs its currency to undercut our prices.

We don’t set our own manufacturing and energy policies. The climatologists and their green allies do that. They decree how much carbon we can emit, from what sources, and when we can do it. Meanwhile, India and China have increased their greenhouse-gas emissions by 10 percent a year in each of the last three years without sanction or consequence.

We don’t control what our Congress does. The lobbyists and special interests do that, financing the campaigns of incumbents who do their work out of view, in committee, inserting clauses in fine print to serve their clients.

We don’t control land use policies in our own communities. The global environmentalists do that, using UN treaties to structure decisions about what we can build and where our cities can grow.

We don’t control our social policies. The courts do that, legislating from their lifetime appointments on the federal and state bench, unelected and unaccountable.

We don’t control our borders. Nobody does that, and more than 12 million people live here illegally.

Meanwhile, internationally, bureaucrats of Western nations have coalesced into a major new drive for power, using international institutions to control the actions of nation-states. Not only do they now try to dominate decision making in their own countries, they want to erect a superstructure of control over all elected national leaders to supersede their authority.

Economists, diplomats, academics, sociologists, demographers, climatologists, international bankers and lawyers, and other elites feel they know what is best for us and are determined to override the decisions of our elected democracies to impose their visions on us.

The international bureaucrats, both American and European have one aim: to cripple the power of we the people of the United States. Ever since the end of the Cold War, they have come to see the unipolar world, dominated by the American democracy, as a dangerous thing. Unwilling to trust the American people with the tremendous power of global leadership, they are trying to marginalize the United States and subsume it within a superstructure of global governance.

To them, the prospect of depending on the wisdom of any democratic electorate is problematic. They see the US electorate as embracing cowboy capitalism, jingoist nationalism, and self-satisfied isolationism. Domestic bureaucrats and supposed international experts seek to ensnare us in a web of laws, regulations, and treaties—using what they call soft power to control us. We are like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians.

Implicit in their entire global construct is the notion that these experts know best and that democracy is a poor substitute for their collective wisdom.

And we are cursed with a president who sees things their way. As Marion Smith of the conservative Heritage Foundation wrote: “The Obama Administration’s direction on human rights and global engagement is consistent with the prevailing international mood. Pooled sovereignty is all the rage among governance experts and practitioners throughout Europe and elsewhere.”2

“Pooled sovereignty?” What a ridiculous phrase. It is an oxymoron! Sovereignty means the power and control that a nation exercises over its own territory. By definition, it can’t be pooled. And, even if it could be, we don’t want to be!

Liberals are pressing for ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty so that we won’t run our coastline. The international community will do that, stripping us of the right to use the oceans at our borders as we wish.

They also want us to become part of the International Court of Justice so we won’t run our own criminal justice system. The court will do that. Americans won’t have the right to trial by jury in this court. Increasingly, international legal precedents find their way into US Supreme Court opinions.

BUREAUCRATS AND BANKERS TRIUMPHANT:
HOW THE FED TOOK OVER THE ECONOMY

The erosion of our democratic control over our lives and our institutions starts at home, with the Federal Reserve Board. Nowhere is the ceding of democratic control to the elites more evident than in the charter, operations, and imperious unaccountability of the Fed.

The Federal Reserve’s powers over the economy clearly exceed those of the president or Congress. It can raise or lower short-term interest rates at will. It determines the size of the money supply. As a regulator, it controls the vast majority of our nation’s banks and, through the provisions of the newly enacted Dodd-Frank legislation, exercises formidable power over the banks and even the nonfinancial institutions it does not regulate.

The supremacy of the Federal Reserve, cemented in the wake of the current economic and fiscal crisis, reflects the victory of our domestic elites over popular government. The Fed is run by a fifteen-member board. Seven of them come from a self-perpetuating group of bankers, chosen by their fellow bankers, with no popular or political involvement. Eight members, including the chairman, are appointed by the president for fixed terms and subject to Senate confirmation. The insulation fixed terms gives the chairman of the Fed makes political control very tenuous and indirect.

The president’s power of appointing the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is more apparent than real. Whenever the chairman’s term comes up, Wall Street clamors for his reappointment to shore up business confidence. They wonder, aloud, whether the president will throw Western civilization into chaos by naming his own man. Since 1953, we have had eleven presidents of the United States, but only five chairmen of the Federal Reserve (not counting G. William Miller, who served for only one year). Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama have all been content to reappoint the chairman who was serving when they took office. These presidents differed with one another radically in their economic policies, but they all bowed to Wall Street when it came to naming the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board—the key economic policy-making position within their control. Presidents change their cabinet frequently and at will, but not the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Board.

The battle between the experts and the people for control over the economy goes way back in American history.

In 1791, in President George Washington’s first term, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and the ruling Federalist Party created the Bank of the United States largely at the behest of financiers and northeastern industrialists. Hamilton’s philosophical and political rival, Thomas Jefferson, viewed the bank with suspicion, distrusting concentrated economic power.

As the bank’s power grew, it began to conflict with the interests and needs of America’s westward expansion. Pioneers wanted easy credit to buy land and put down stakes, but the bank was committed to high rates and limited credit. The same theme has recurred throughout our history: Those without money want easy credit to amass wealth, while those already financially endowed want tight money policies to protect it.

In the early 1830s, populist President Andrew Jackson from the then-frontier state of Tennessee struck back against the bank and its champion, Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster. Jackson prevailed, warning that if one institution had control over the currency, credit, and the money supply, it would become an oligarchy strangling the economy and corrupting the government.

However, it soon became evident that Jackson had gone too far in killing the bank entirely, because there was nothing to take its place. Each state chartered its own banks, which fueled rampant speculation and currency instability. A disastrous depression followed in the late 1830s, and the economy hobbled along without a stable currency.

Pressed by the financial demands of the Civil War, Lincoln and Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase printed greenbacks, paper currency not backed by gold but by bonds sold to the public. Amid the exigency and urgency of the Civil War, the northern public accepted the greenbacks and bought the bonds that underpinned them.

But, as the Civil War ended, tight money policies returned. In 1863, Lincoln created federally chartered banks and, after Appomattox, Wall Street called upon the government to stop printing paper currency and return to a gold-only money supply.

These tight money policies, coupled with the high protective tariffs business demanded, enraged the farmers. They had to borrow money to buy feed, seed, fertilizer, and land, and then had to pay back these loans with ever-scarcer dollars, as the value of the currency increased. And, compounding their anger, they had to purchase household goods that were more and more expensive because of the high tariffs.

In 1896, their discontent erupted into a political war, a key turning point in our history. The Democrats, largely from the South and the West, were led by presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, who demanded that tight money policies end. His core idea was to let silver, which was more plentiful than gold, circulate as an additional form of currency. He called it bimetalism. He stirred farmers into a crusade crying, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” The Wall Street-dominated Republicans nominated William McKinley, as they recoiled in horror at the idea of a cheap currency and insisted on a gold-only, tight-credit money supply.

McKinley won and gold reigned supreme. Tight money had triumphed. American capitalism boomed on a foundation of sound money behind high protective tariff walls.

However, the tight credit policies kept dragging down the farmers, who still dominated the American economy. Financial panics dogged McKinley’s successor President Theodore Roosevelt. But the private sector regulated, and righted, itself. When Roosevelt faced a massive economic panic in 1905, he summoned J. P. Morgan (not the bank, the man) to the White House and asked him to intervene to stop financial collapse. Forbes describes how Morgan rallied Wall Street’s bankers and “sent the vice president of the Stock Exchange down on to the floor with their money to buy significant positions in blue-chip American stocks at some 300% of their market value. That action staved off complete collapse of the banking system . . .”3

However, the panics kept coming, and nobody could stop the one that seared through the country in 1907 from dragging down prosperity. The economy and the banking system had become too large for any one man, or bank, to regulate it and prevent panic from leading to collapse.

So, on December 23, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation, part of his New Freedom agenda, creating the Federal Reserve Board.

And, with the ascension of the Fed to power, our economy came to be managed by an elite of economists, bankers, and financiers, without much reference to the power of democratically elected officials.

Initially, the Fed’s mandate was to promote banking stability, protect the currency, and hold down inflation.

Throughout the 1920s, the Federal Reserve Board permitted relatively easy credit policies and fueled the stock market boom of the roaring decade. Investors were allowed to buy stocks on credit (margin) with only a minimal down payment, and a giant speculative bubble began to form.

And a devastating bust followed when the stock market crashed in 1929 and the economy reeled into the Great Depression. But the Federal Reserve made the depression far worse. The Fed did not see its job as fighting unemployment or mitigating the effects of the depression, but rather focused on fighting inflation and protecting the currency. When the Fed’s leaders saw first Hoover, then FDR, spending more and more to fight the depression, they worried that the resulting budget deficits would undermine the currency and trigger inflation so they raised interest rates, which tightened credit and deepened the depression. This huge mistake denied the economy badly needed stimulus after the 1929 crash. Then, the Fed repeated ...