Body Parts

The Question About Israel in the Struggle with Iran

I have beat the drum on the Iranian-Israeli confrontation for years, with rising alarm. Always, it seems to me, the American debate over what to do about the impending Iranian nuclear bomb has failed to address the ultimate issue. For the Iranian revolutionary state and for Israel, their confrontation clearly is existential. The Iranian state needs the bomb to protect its revolution (of Muslim factionalism Shiite v. Sunni, of Persian v. Arab, and margin v. center of Islam) . We have no evidence that the majority of the Iranian citizenry does not support national possession of a bomb. Israel must prevent Iran from having a nuclear bomb, because Iran has sworn to eradicate Israel and all its Jews (without mentioning the million Arab-Israelis who would die also). While the US has traditionally supported Israel, and Obama professes maintaining this legacy alliance, Obama has gone out of his way to identify Israel as the source of Middle East problems and to affiliate himself with Israel's enemies. So the ultimate question about this conflict between Iran and Israel is masked in deliberate obsfucation by Obama.

What is the ultimate question? It is this: will we be the generation of Americans who permitted Iran to complete Hitler's grand goal of the Jew's universal Holocaust? For that is what is at stake. If Israel is destroyed, only the US will harbor a significant portion of the Jews who were left after 1945. Are we willing to live with that infamy? Obama obviously is. I am not. Are you?

Occupy Wall Street Goes Violent: Prelude to Conservative Reaction

As Occupy Wall Street turns from incoherence to aimless violence, we are reminded of protests, urban riots, and the self-inflicted incineration of black neighborhoods in the 1960s. Opposition to traditional values tumbled from the heights of orderly civil rights marchs to the depths of aimless radical anarchism. And the political end-result: the American public in general reacted out of their conservatism, finally electing Ronald Reagan in 1980. The majority of American people will no more sympathize and ally with the street vendors of violence now than they did then. Obama, see faint echoes of his socialism in OWS slogans, has sided with the protestors' encampments, a political mistake that will redound to the benefit of Republicans.

Obama Wags His Dog: Uganda Policeman

Prior to the 2010 Congressional election losses for the Democratic Party, Obama's foreign policy strategy was to replace Pax Americana with a United National Harmonium. That strategy required him to end the US's role as the world policeman, dramatically reduce US military capability so as to make the role of policeman unworkable, build the UN's role in fostering world piece, build Muslim self esteem so presumably Muslims wouldn't attack others out of psychological insecurity, hector and plead world conflicts into disappearing, end the military effort destroy terrorism's bases in Iraq and Afghanistan -- the familiar ideology of the Stalinist sponsored Leftist agenda during the Cold War applied to the post-Cold War era. It hasn't worked of course. Wishful thinking crashes in front of reality.  Obama is left with egg on his face, revealed as generally ineffectual and foolish in foreign policy and international security.

But he has had several minor political successes in foreign policy: the killing of Osama and the adventure in Libya. The Osama killing was good fortune, for which Obama's role was not screwing up something for which he wasn't responsible. Libya was a different matter. Following Clinton's Bosnia script, he succeeded in ridding the world of a murderous vermin using air power and suffering no ground combat casualties (at least as far as we know -- we haven't been informed about secret US advisers to Libya's "rebels" and whether there were casualties among them).

Why did Obama engage in the Libyan adventure? He was reluctant, and let Europe take the lead, but eventually he engaged. Why? Domestic electoral politics. He wanted to show he could be a decisive leader, exercise power, and not walk the US into foreign combat quagmires. That was a neat little boost for Obama. It was a classic exercise in being the world's policeman, even if leading from behind and co-opting other nations to do most of the heavy lifting.  

Now Obama had send "advisors" into Uganda to help that nation rid itself of a violent war lord. It's billed as a humanitarian gesture, but humanitarian for whom? Mostly and importantly for Obama himself. If successful, quickly and without US casualties, the police action would give a little Libyian boost in this presidential election. The scenario is called wagging the dog. The embarrassment from which this adventure rescues Obama is not a possible sexual scandal (not to say that the US press would investigate rumors of his girl friend anyway). It is the complete failure and unpopularity of all of his policies since he was elected. He has no record to run on.

Woof, woof, Mr. President.

OccupyWallStreet: Follow the Money To Campaign Obama

It is not a coincidence that small groups of young protestors and a sprinkling of union types are protesting Banks/Capitalism/Corporations at the same time that President Obama is ratcheting  his re-election campaign up on the class warfare theme of greedy rich people not paying their fair share of taxes, i.e., social justice. Obama needs some public demonstration of support of this theme, lest it appear only as more of his usual leftist hectoring. So, on cue, we have the protestors. This is all politics of theater, of which the Left has historically been the master. Phony protests by obedient followers of the Doctrine. Would some journalist follow the money, please? Where do these groups get the money to organize, advertise, support themselves while protesting, and pay for the tv and video monitors at OccupyWallStreet central street headquarters? Un, huh, it wasn't from their jobs, because many claim to be unemployed. The money obviously comes indirectly from the Obama campaign or its donor benefactors through some conduit organization. Some journalist might try doing research and finding out which. 

The Globe Teeters On the Edge of Another Recession: The Crisis of the Experts

Many, including this blogger, have warned for a long time that we were never really out of the Great Recession, and that the macroeconomic measures that seemed to imply it was over were faulty. Now the "slow down" is manifest in declining trade, shipping, manufacturing, and consumption data over months. And investors around the world are paying attention. World stock markets are tanking. The markets might recover -- some analysts say the markets reflect the printing of paper money, and governments will print more paper money (i.e., create more debt) and the markets will temporarily revive.

The journalistic mantra is that the source of the current slowdown and investment crisis is Greek debt, or Italian debt, or Spanish debt, or everybody's debt except the thrifty, hardworking Germans. But this is nonsense. The source of the crisis is that the world has run out of money to pay for the vast welfare states the advanced economies created in the past generation. The welfare state grew on the basis of debt, and now no state has enough money to pay the debt. Further, there's not enough credit to incur more debt, because there is not enough productivity or future productivity to pay off more debt.

There's not enough productivity, because there is not enough consumption; that's what the experts say, but they are wrong about why. There is not enough consumption, because through the entire Western world the labor class has fallen apart. All the welfare, all the food stamps, all the free medical care, all the easy mortgages, all the free job training, all the free or cheap education, have been to no avail. The social structure of working classes is disintegrating -- marriages failing, out-of-wedlock births rising, young men jobless and listless and getting into trouble, older men out of work and unable to gin up motivation to tackle life, standards of living declining as immorality overwhelms straight-up endeavor.

The cause of these social pathologies (and they are pathologies, because they symptomize unhealthy life and sick people) is exactly the remedy imposed on the working classes by the social experts: welfare. The working classes don't need to accumulate wealth, because the main use of wealth, the transfer to their children's generation as a basis for its middle class position, is no longer needed. They don't pay income taxes and reject work because if they do work they'll have to pay taxes, so why bother. The welfare state has sucked the spiritual health out of once vibrant, optimistic, upwardly mobile, healthy classes of workers. The white working class, which was once distant from the pathologies of the black working class, now finds itself mirroring the black working classes' moral impoverishment. The working classes are shrugging their shoulders and saying cynically, they don't give a fuck. They have guaranteed low incomes from welfare; the materialistic rewards of consumption are not worth striving for.

The middle class feels the acidity and impoverishment of the working class loam which once nourished and replenished the middle class. The middle class is detached from its historic roots, because the ladder of social mobility from lower to middle classes is broken. Deprived of the elan and joy, the spiritual sense of self-worth and accomplishment, that comes from workers and families who have advanced themselves, the middle class becomes spiritless itself. It's all dross, crumbling IKEA furniture, and peeling flat paint in suburbia. So the middle class picks up the whine -- it too wants emoluments of welfare. And as it gets them, the virtue, the values, the health of the middle class ebbs, like a patient dying from an undiagnosed wasting disease. ObamaCare, if we are so stupid as not to reform or repeal it, will apply the fatal blow of death.

The governing elite of career politicians, of banking and fiscal experts, of bureaucratic officialdom, can't restart economic growth to prosperity, because their macroeconomic models don't incorporate the social news and their fiscal models are so dishonest they reveal nothing about reality. They haven't a clue about the social pathology spreading from the lower class to the middle class. And all the remedies, that the elites and Obama in America and the egg-sucking social democratic politicians in Europe push onto the ailing classes, only fortify the pathologies destroying them.

The experts can't get consumers to spend, because consumers' income isn't increasing and in real money terms is decreasing. Because many consumers aren't working or aren't working enough to put themselves ahead. Because many consumers, the working and middle classes, signed off the American dream and bought into dreary welfare resignation. The elites keep creating money and throwing it at these groups, but this has been the problem all along: free money, free welfare, saps the spirit.

So we will have "another" recession, that is, a reinvigoration of the Great Recession that remains with us, because the experts haven't got a clue. The only hope is that government created misery will get so bad that the revolt created by the Tea Party will spread and we will have a change of regime. Throw out the governing elite, throw out the experts. Let the economy return where it belongs, on the labors of the people. When it does, those of us with faith in the American heritage believe, the people will re-create the economy and real growth will begin.

The Regulatory State, the Suppression of Small Business, and the Loss of Freedom

Twice in the last 100 years, national governmental policy decisions have led to the destruction of a sector of small business. The first instance concerned agriculture. Small farms began their long decline in the late nineteenth century, but the collapse of agriculture in Great Depression convinced New Deal policy makers that small farming was uneconomical and needed to end. Small farmers were unable to adopt the technology and husbandry practices that conserved land, maximized crop production, and achieved economies of scale. In addition, small farmers were often uneducated in agriculture and did not understand the best agricultural methods. In the 1940s, academic economists recommended that the national government adopt policies that would shift agricultural production toward large, commodity farms where industrial methods could be adopted and low prices assured for the nation's consumers. These recommendations were adopted in the following several decades and implemented through regulation. They largely succeeded in their goals. Small farming declined greatly throughout the country and practically disappeared in some areas, such as New England. For instance, small dairy farms could not afford the equipment required by new sanitary regulations and disappeared around the country. Immigrant agricultural labor restrictions deprived fruit growers of laborers and their farms dies when they could not harvest crops. As commodification proceeded, large farms became more economical and land prices rose. Small farmers could not afford to expand and neighboring larger farmers bought them out. As a consequence, rural population declined and small market towns collapsed for lack of customers.

Across the whole nation, rural areas are now populated with the archaeological relics of the small farm era - abandoned shopping main streets, boarded up and dilapitated houses in the surrounding residential blocks, closure of local schools, loss of medical and other professional services. Against this collapse of rural life, in the 1970s and 1980s, some venturous souls, often with no farming experience or education, started farms on the outskirts of prosperous cities, usually to supply upscale restaurants with specialized produce, dairy, and meats. Many women started farms - their successful little businesses the basis of legends today in the goat dairy and produce industries in northern California, Maine and New Hampshire, for instance. The rise of hobby and boutique farming has been inspiring, but it has not halted the demise of the small cultivator. 

In looking back over this story, we need to keep in mind that the collapse of rural life in America was not due, as often popularly suggested, by the allure of city life, but by the difficulties of economic success after national market commodification of agriculture by the railroads at the end of the nineteenth century and the deliberate decision by the federal government to force the small farmer out of agriculture in the twentieth century. A whole sector of private, small producer business and an entire historical era ended.

In the past half century, federal policy and the burden of regulation have continued to suppress - rather than encourage growth of - small businesses. If ObamaCare is not repealed or reformed, we will see a similar collapse of the small medical practitioner. The medical regulatory burden - taxes, audit, information collection, squeeze on fees, civil rights definition of patient load - is, even now, destroying the solo practitioner and the small partnership. ObamaCare's disease and treatment reporting requirements are so onerous - over 100,000 categories that doctors are supposed to utilize to report cases to the government - that the small practitioner does not have revenue to pay for the staff needed to meet the requirement. Further, Medicare and Medicaid fee structures reward the specialized mass production medical practice.  The primary care physician is already collapsing. Hospitals are rapidly purchasing small medical practices, sending the physicians into retirement and collectivizing their medical care in the hospital clinics.

The result of this trend is the industrialization of medical care. Industrialization of medicine will - absolutely will - lower the quality of medical care. First, more medical examination will be handled by non-physicians, often as preparatory to examination by a physician; but eventually, nurses and paraprofessionals will be making diagnoses and dispensing treatment. Second, when you do see a physician, the physician will not spend much time with you. The 15 minute appointment is common today, but in industrialized medicine, much of that 15 minutes will be spend by the doctor looking at a computer screen, filling out on-line forms, and meeting federal reporting requirements. The doctor will deal with simply the problem you explicity present, but will not provide the kind of examination that would reveal other medical problems you might have. S/he will not be asking probing questions unrelated to the medical condition of which you complain. Many medical tests will be ordered - as federal payment structure rewards testing. But the well-health of the patient will be of subordinate interest. You will notice the decline of medical care. You will complain that you don't think you are being well cared for, and you won't be.

Big regulation requires big corporate businesses, and the continual advancement and expansion of regulations pushes corporate collectivation of business. There are four inevitable results of this trend.

The first result is the cartelization of business sectors. Small business is ground out. Large businesses combine, until there are only a few businesses in a sector. The bulk of Beef processing, investment banking, steel making, aircraft manufacture, are today conducted by a few, meaning less than a half dozen, large companies. 

The second result is the discouragement of competitive efficiency. The big businesses must bloat their managements to administer and comply with regulations. Computerization, which should be one basis for productive efficiency, is eaten up by complying with regulatory requirements. 

The third result is a struggle for monopoly profits. The high cost regulation can, in the end, be paid for only by some degree of monopolization, in which the company can extract more from the customer than it could if it had competition. The government will permit this monopolization, because government needs those monopoly profits transferred to it to pay for its regulatory bureaucracy and for political favors. As a result, most business sectors in the country will be dominated by businesses too big for government to let fail in a business crisis.

The fourth result is fascism, in the crudest sense. It is the merging of the government regulatory elite with the monopoly business elite, which will function as a single governing elite, under the sway of the governing political party. The businesses will contribute to the politics of the political party that controls the regulatory bureaucracy and the party will shower political favors on the businesses, saving them from failure if needed. This is not a new story. When the Progressives at the turn of the twentieth century began to regulate natural monopolies, as they called them, such as electricity production and distribution, they noticed that the same persons circulated from regulatory commission to governmental administrative bureaucracy to private business. They then realized that this would be an inevitable consequence of regulation, as regulation produced a class of experts, as the only persons who could administer regulations on either side, government or business. In fascist Italy and Germany before World War Two, this situation led to political control of big national businesses by the political parties.

In the end, the historic decline of small business brings the loss of economic freedom, and the loss of economic liberty brings the decline of political freedom. And this shall surely be the result of ObamaCare and the rest of Obama's regulatory agenda, which represent and symbolize this consummation of regulation.

Obama's Bad Faith

We expect all politicians to lie. Lying is part of the political game, says public cynicism. So the comic asks: What is the difference between a politician and a statesman? Answer: The politician lies for himself, the statesman lies for his country. (Or herself, of course.) Lying is intrinsic to democratic politics, because political constituencies contain diverse political opinions on diverse issues. To be elected, the politician must convince groups, who hold opposed views, that he supports the contradictory views of both groups. So he has to lie to one of them, probably both. Lying is tied to procedural structures in legislation. Many votes are taken on measures before assemblies. Amendments are often introduced for the sole purpose of providing representatives opportunities to vote against them or for them to satisfy this or that constituency. This situation is the norm for electoral, representative politics.

From this norm, Obama the representative, presidential candidate, and President has been a sequential liar in the expected political tradition. Par for the course. So what? Well, Obama's lying is more than normal. It's special. Obama has bad faith. One does not hear the expression, bad faith, often any more. It was a key concept in twentieth century existentialist philosophy. It referred to the simultaneous telling of a lie, as a deception the liar did not believe, and the liar's believing the lie, as if the liar were the person being addressed and hearing it. Bad faith is a false mode of being. Bad faith was conceptually tied to authenticity, which denotes a free act expressing one's known and understood will. Authenticity requires a person to have an undivided self not in conflict with itself, able to resist the diverse contradictory pressures of the material world and of popular opinion. An authentic person has an inner ground of being upon which he (or she, of course) acts in the world.

One does not hear much about authenticity and bad faith any more. It was a popular philosophical coupling in the era of twentieth century totalitarianism. It represented a philosophy opposed to fascism and communism. It's utility died when affirmative action, social promotion, political correctness, and legal protection of historically disadvantaged groups became governmentally mandated social goals in the US and Europe. Authenticity is an idea appropriate to an individualistic philosophy, not a collectivist philosophy. But collectivist totalitarianism of language in supposedly free America did not - ironically, I suppose - banish bad faith from society; it institutionalized bad faith as a way of being. On the one hand, legacy concepts, such as freedom, justice, merit, and responsibility, remained the legal coinage of the realm, but, on the other hand, the social tender on which the social economy actually operated became bad faith. Institutionalized misrepresentation of social facts presented itself as true and backed up its misrepresentation with law and regulatory policy. For instance, affirmative action supposedly ensured that historically discriminated groups received an equal opportunity to compete on merit, but in fact practiced discrimination, denial of equal opportunity, and appointment and advancement based on status, with competitive merit at best a secondary factor.  

In school, institutionalized bad faith resulted in "social promotion". Recipients of the benefits of social promotion were enabled to say they were meritorious and believe it, while simultaneously being advanced on non-meritorious grounds. Thus many public schools have more than one "valedictorian"; so one southern California high school graduated several dozen "valedictorians". Classic Orwellian totalitarian false speak (e.g., all  people are equal, but some people are more equal than others). Our President is a lifetime beneficiary of this mandated bad faith. It provided the context for his public advancement, in which he was able to do little of the work required of him and receive extravagant praise for it. He receives high praise for writing a brilliant autobiography, when the fact that he didn't write it is known. He receives a Nobel peace prize for doing nothing - the consummate international validation of social promotion. Bad faith framed his fundamentally Marxist philosophy, enabling him simultaneously to believe in it and to deny he believed it - a situation that should embarrass any Marxist since Marxists celebrated their authenticity. They were willing to die for their (fully fallacious) ideology.

Obama's presidency has been an extraordinary exercise in bad faith. His duplicity was on full display in his advocacy of ObamaCare, when he travelled around the country saying, for instance, it would save money and that everyone with insurance would be able to keep their insurance, both expedient lies that many independent observers proved could not be true. As a graduate of America's school of social promotion, Obama believed his lies and didn't believe his lies. This performance is now being repeated in his "jobs plan", a performance so obviously false that even the state media questions his assertions.

The decline in Obama's popularity has been attributed to many factors, not least the sense that he is an ineffective loser. But I see underneath this decline a growing recognition by the public that he is, not just a politician who lies for himself, but, worse. He is a man of bad faith. He is not authentic. He betrays Americans' basic notion that our country raises authentic people, with authenticity that is the basis of heroism, authenticity that is the basis of leadership, authenticity that is battle tested, authenticity that springs from humility earned in extraordinary adversity where lying cannot win the day. He betrays his country.

Obama and the New Deal Myth of Public Works Construction

In his not-eagerly-awaited speech on creating jobs in America, Obama will try to accomplish three well-work socialist goals: (1) Blame the lack of new jobs on the Republicans, (2) to expand the power of the federal government, and (3) propose public works infrastructure projects.

The first and second tactics require no explanation. The only question is the precise nature of the lies and name-calling he will employ. The third objective is worth looking at. Public works infrastructure projects are hoary tradition in progressivist, socialist, and communist societies. We can easily think of the Italian and German fascists of the 1920s and 1930s making the trains run on time and the Russian communists building the Moscow subways. In the US, building Hoover Dam and other dams in the Midwest are often held up as great New Deal projects and the National Defense Highway system of the 1950s (continuing) is held up as a project everybody agreed upon. Obama, like all progressive liberals and socialists, drools over public works projects. The political payoff for such projects is irresistible: posters, news video footage, and photo ops in hard hards in front of CGI renderings of big train stations with shiny trains, towering dams, big yellow Caterpillar tractors, airports with big jet liners, all providing the illusion that something wonderful is coming to the voter from the "Government" at someone else's expense.

So why would anyone object to Obama proposing infrastructure projects today? Well, it's all in the details.

What is to be solved by the infrastructure projects? If the goal is to generate jobs and draw the unemployed labor back into the employed labor force quickly, say within several years, then infrastructure project cannot meet those goals. They simply cannot.

Infrastructure projects today are performed within a huge, multi-layered, federal and state regulatory context. There was no such thing as "shovel-ready" construction projects in 2008, there are none today. Why? Because decisions and review and approval take an enormous amount of time -- years. There are no fast tracks. There is never enough money to go around, so political processes must be invoked to decide which projects to pursue and how to schedule them. State and federal reviews must be conducted before any construction can be dones -- state and federal Environmental Impact and EPA reviews, labor reviews, construction plan review. Competitive bidding must be conducted. Rules must be set for winning bids, as to labor force composition, where women contractors are given a fair shot at winning bids, etc.  Land and construction rights must be obtained. Political process of public hearing  review of plans and review of reviews must be conducted, followed by inevitable law suits. Eminent domain proceedings must be engaged. Losers along the way will sue and also engage in politics to prevent projects from proceeding. Look at how far along the famous rapid rail projects of California have come in more than three years. Exactly no where.  Construction projects will not employ a single person for years, certainly not in time to prevent our economy from falling off the cliff of a second "Great Recession".

Obama is also expected to endorse a National (i.e., Federal) Infrastructure Bank to assist financing of infrastructure projects. Well, this should work out just swell. Such a bank would add an another agency and its review to the list of reviews above. And can we really trust such a bank not to screw up construction? Remember the federally insured mortgage banks that created the financial crisis of the Great Recession by granting millions of mortgages to poor credit risks, all in the name of social objectives? And why do you think a federal infrastructure bank would be any better? It's not needed and would only add a level of political mischief to already politically corrupt process of public works infrastructure construction. Construction companies feed fees to the public coffers and contributions to re-election campaigns, then receive construction contracts in return for projects, paid out of tax monies, of questionable value. Think of the famous rail line connecting New York City to JFK. Think hundreds of millions of dollars wasted.

Conclusion: Public works infrastructure projects would add trillions to the national debt, requiring increase in taxes to pay for the debt, not employ a single person for years, and intensify the political corruption of publicly funded public works construction.

What Is Wrong With the American Economy is More Fundamental Than Economics

Whoa, dude! We is slipping back into recession, or at least stagnant drift, or -- gasp! -- double-dip recession. The housing recovery hasn't taken off. Manufacturing is sputtering. Jobless rate is up (again). Horrifying federal deficit and debts dampen future prospects. China faces slowdown or inflation. Europe continues to expose financial problems like a small pox epidemic. Fabulous prosperity everywhere is limited to coastal enclaves where the super-rich can ski or sunbathe or shop, do lunch, show off luxury automobiles, and sell their signature houses at ridiculous prices owing to their association with the celebrities who have dined, bedded, or died therein. Meanwhile, for the rest of us, not so much. The question is, why.

There are two traditional answers to this question of economic performance. Values or economics. Obviously, in the anthropologically rich real world, value and economics are intertwined, interrelated, intermeshed, bound up, and otherwise symbiotically mutually dependent. Nonetheless, scholars have tried for centuries to separate the two factors, because in the real world, if you want to change a situation, you have to know where to push. The modern debate began in the nineteenth century. Early capitalists, such as Spencer, argued that economics was the primary factor of economic change. Change the economic rules and conditions, economic performance changes. The advocates of laissez-nous faire policy thought that economic growth, widespread of economic wealth, and social prosperity would follow up unleashing free capitalist enterprise. Marx disagreed about the benefits of capitalism, of course, but agreed as an economist that, once the fundamental relationships of private capital ownership were established, economics ruled economic and social change.

The mighty blast against the economists came from the sociologists and, later, anthropologists, leading off with Max Weber. Weber argued that values drove economics. Persons obtained a set of values (he thought from religious belief) that encouraged behavior appropriate to prospering economically, such as honesty and building trust in relationships, hard labor, saving money, and investing for the future. Without the values, all the economic policy manipulation in the world would fail.

This historic debate is at the core of the problem of interpreting the economic indicators today. Economists and governmental policy bureaucrats argue that the sluggishness of growth is entirely the product of macro-economic conditions and prosperity can be restored by manipulation of those conditions, especially federal monetary and fiscal policies. If this philosophy is working, it is not working well, hence the public anxiety.

Other observers, such as c'est moi of Body Parts, argue that underlying social deterioration is rotting the economic foundation of America's historic economic prosperity. This is an argument I have made consistently for years. Specifically, the labor class is losing the values -- the beliefs and attitudes -- that sustained it. The faith in working hard, even at less than satisfying jobs, saving, and investing for the future is eroding. The conviction that economic independence is rooted in family formation, integrity, and success has been eroded. As a result, belief that the economic escalator of upward mobility will work and is the preferred means of betterment has been weakened. This weakening is reinforced by the prolonged economic recession and stagnant "recovery". This critique is not just an opinion based on anecdote, it is also the finding of scholarship. Charles Murray, at the Enterprise Institute, has completed a long-term study of values and behavior of the white labor class and finds just these results. Recently, in his Bradley lecture, he argued that over the last half century, the labor class has lost its historic values that made America a unique country and prosperous economy. He speculates, as one would expect from his early books, that is is the rise of the welfare state that has eroded the basis of the labor class. All of this obtains my concurrence.

So what we face in America today is a financial crisis on top of an economic crisis, driven a profoundly fundamental crisis in our social values. The collapse of the white labor class is the signal of what is wrong, and it is paralleled by precisely similar developments in the black labor class. We are in danger of losing our soul, so to speak.

As a last point, let me note that this fundamental crisis sets up the issues for the 2012 presidential election. Politicians will be deployed along its fault lines. Some politicians (e.g., President Obama, former governor Mitt Romney) will argue that technical manipulation of governmental policy and policy regulations, especially economic ones, will solve the crisis. I believe they are wrong (see above) and will only prolong the crisis and make it more difficult to solve, or even put a fundamental solution beyond reach. Other politicians (e.g., let us hope, former governor Sarah Palin) will argue that social values are the real basic issue, that we must attend to them first and revise economic policy and regulation on that basis. I agree with her. We will see this debate played out in the half dozen years, regardless of who wins in November 2012, and I will help explain the debate in the terms I have outlined above.

Obama Command-in-Chief Stumbles Around: After Professionalism, Clowns Cavort in Amateur Hour

The military raid on bin Laden's Pakistan compound, the superb professionalism of the Navy Seals, the swift terrible vengeance of bin Laden's death, and the President's announcement of the successful action were, all of them, moments to make Americans proud. For a moment, the President stepped out of the Jimmy Carter Incompetency Paradigm and acted with decisiveness to protect the nation. Now, merely a couple of days later, the veil of Leftist incompetence has been drawn around the action and the President and his administration stumble around, making a mess of the whole episode.

The President's speech which spoke of absolute certainty that bin Laden lived in the compound is now seen to be after-the-fact rationalization. The Wall Street Journal reported that the CIA and other intelligence services were acting on hunches of high probability, but not certainty. What were the Seals' orders? Were they ordered to kill bin Laden, as they, as agents of the United States, certainly had the right and moral obligation to do? We are at war with Al Qaeda and bin Laden, as much as Hitler or any other leader of a declared enemy, was a target to be killed. Now the account of bin Laden's killing is muddied. On Sunday, the White House said Obama ordered bin Laden to be captured if he did not post a threat. Initially, he was reported to have been armed and shooting, so he was killed. Now that account is corrected; he was unarmed. Now Attorney General Holder, a card-carrying Leftist of the Internationale, who has adamantly maintained that we are bound to treat all nonuniformed enemy terrorists by the Geneva Accords, says that killing unarmed bin Laden was right. So now the Director of the CIA says that bin Laden was making threatening gestures that warranted the Seals shooting him, rather than taking him prisoner. Threatening gestures? What the hell are they? Spitting at the Seals? Shaking his fist at them? Ordering his wife or 12-year old child to attack the Seals?  This is nonsense. It implies the President didn't know what he was doing. Will death-photos of bin Laden be released to prove that he was indeed killed? A death photo, originating in a leak and published in an Arabic media source, is already circulating on the Internet. It is clear that eventually a death photo will have to be released, so that the Arab street can't believe in the lie that the Navy Seal death raid is a hoax. Why not do it now? Why drag out opposition to the inevitable? Is Obama's infantile response to requests to see his birth certificate--denial that reasonable people can see a problem, obsfucation, opposition, delay--actually Obama's normal mode of reacting to the need for decision? Apparently so.  The post-episode political treatment of the episode has revealed the President and his highest staff to be a bunch of clowns, who can't manage a straight story. The President can't even run his own administration. They stumble around in contradiction of their steadfast Leftist statements of just a few months ago, and compromise our victory. For a few moments, we thought Obama had grown some spine, had turned away, at least for that moment, from his anti-American ideology in order to defend American security. Now the moral right and strength of this Victory is dribbled away. The President has returned to his normal flaccid state.