Ignorant, Incompetent, or Revolutionary About the Economy?
All politicians these days run on the theme that they will create jobs–even if they don’t have the foggiest idea how to do so.
There’s a state representative in my district who boasts with each newsletter and press announcement that his number one priority is creating jobs. However, he’s a liberal progressive whose “day job” is to work on a governmental board that creates no wealth, just talks the talk.
Then there is Congressman Joe Sestak–yes, that Joe Sestak– who was offered a “job” in the Obama administration if he would step out of the Pennsylvania primary to make room for Arlen Specter. When interviewed about his priorities, he remarked “I want to create jobs for working families.” However, he’s spent most of his life as an Admiral in the Navy and now as a Congressman. He knows very little about how to create private sector jobs. Besides, last time I checked “all families” work. (Am I missing something?)
Which brings me to President Obama and his administration. They spent 862 billion in their first few months on a “stimulus package” that was supposed to halt the recession and create millions of new jobs. Here’s what the Heritage Foundation says about that failed effort:
“Our nation’s unemployment rate is hovering near 10% not because of record job losses…but because of record job non-creation. Private sector employers have gone on strike. Contrary to what the President’s economic wizards and New York Times columnists believe, massive government deficit spending does not stimulate job creation. President Obama does not have a secret vault of money he can just throw at the American people. The resources the government spends come from the economy. When the government increases spending, it crowds out the resources that business owners could have invested in their enterprises.”
Then came along last week’s Department of Labor jobs report, which showed private sector job creation fell by 190,000 between April and May of this year. Again according to the Heritage Foundation, “this bad news jolted markets worldwide including the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which fell 3.2% Friday to its lowest level since early February. In total the U.S. economy has now lost a net of 2.2 million jobs since President Barack Obama signed his stimulus bill, and his administration is now 7.2 million jobs short of what he promised his $862 billion stimulus would help create by 2010. This morning on MSNBC, former Rep. Joe Scarborough (R-FL) pressed prominent Keynesian economist and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University Jeffrey Sachs on whether it was too early to declare President Obama’s stimulus a failure. Scarborough had to ask the question twice, but Sachs finally relented: “It did fail.”
Also keep in mind that the American economy needs to add 50,000 jobs per month just to keep up with population growth. So the loss of 2.2 million jobs since the stimulus is abysmal indeed.
I think it’s time to be brutally honest about the leaders who are running the economy in our nation. This need for probing evaluation reminds me of a famous C.S. Lewis teaching in Mere Christianity where he shared the truth about Jesus Christ. He said that there are only three ways to look at the life of Jesus. Based on his life, words and works, he was either:
- A liar,
- A lunatic,
- Or Lord of heaven and earth.
All people must choose based on these three choices. There are no others.
Using similar logic, I believe there are only three rational choices we can make about the economic performance of our current national leaders. They are either:
- Ignorant when it comes to creating jobs,
- Incompetent in their governing skills,
- Or revolutionaries who don’t really want to create jobs but desire to fundamentally transform America into a different kind of nation.
Ignorance
It’s hard to believe that a group of people from Ivy League schools are ignorant about job creation, but wiser minds have been saying for decades that secular universities are educating people away from common sense. Many of our government elite have been trained in a liberal environment that is anti-free enterprise and pro-Big Government. Their ignorance comes from a man-centered worldview that denies freedom and accountability before God and exalts human governments as instruments of social improvement. They do not understand that governments do not create wealth–they only confiscate it and re-distribute it to non-productive sectors.
Here’s the time-tested formula for economic advance: Faith in God produces human liberty and moral character. Character produces vision, initiative, creativity and hard work, that when combined with limited government and low taxation, produce jobs, wealth and prosperity.
The opposite is also true. Secularization diminishes moral character and human worth producing less initiative and drive creating more dependency on others. Higher taxes and increased social spending inhibit the free market from producing wealth and growing prosperity.
God. Morality. Freedom. Prosperity. These are the American (biblical) ingredients for success.
Are our present leaders simply ignorant of these principles?
Incompetence
The Carter administration is often viewed as the most incompetent of the modern presidencies. Jimmy Carter also believed in Big Government solutions, higher taxes, and social re-distribution (it was his Community Re-Investment Act that sowed the original seeds of the mortgage meltdown of 2008). In foreign policy he was seen as a weak leader who dithered while American hostages were taken and multiplied “malaise” among the public. It took Ronald Reagan to point the nation back to God, morality, freedom, lower taxes, and peace through strength.
After eighteen months in office, it appears that Barack Obama is a gifted orator and campaigner, but a very incompetent leader. It’s no wonder. He’s never led anything in his life except a brief stint of community organizing. He has no executive experience, he’s painfully cerebral in reponding to needs and crises (four month delay in sending additional troops to Afghanistan, no response to Nashville flooding, and slow and inept response to protecting the shores of the Gulf States from the BP fiasco). And on foreign policy, he has emboldened both Iran and North Korea by his weakness and dissed America’s only democratic friend in the Middle East–the nation of Israel.
Is the Obama administration sincere, but just over its head in trying to lead our nation?
Revolutionaries
Most people believe that our president and those around him are really smart people. They just can’t be this ignorant about how to stimulate job creation! Not with all those Ph.Ds! They are also hard-working folks who can’t be guilty of gross incompetence!
That only leaves one honest choice: What they are doing to the American economy is deliberate. They know what they’re doing and they’re doing it fervently and incremently because at heart they are revolutionaries who want to fundamentally change America from a Christian-based, freedom loving nation to a secular-oriented social democracy like much of Europe. Many believe this is the major driving force behind the lack of job creation and massive growth of government. They don’t want to create more jobs–they truly want to create more dependency which increases their power and paternity.
The present Administration in the United States is not doing much for the nation. They are either ignorant of free enterprise, incompetent in governing skills, or revolutionary in outlook.
Maybe they are a little of all three. You make the call.
Today is a primary day in many states. I am praying that the American people take an honest look at their current leaders and pray fervently and vote wisely on June 8, in November, and in 2012.
Our future depends on what John Adams wrote on a plaque that hangs in the White House:
“May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof” (women too).”
A Mission of Destruction
“If God does not exist then everything is permitted.” –Dostoevsky
I ran across this famous quote in a booklet that I read this week. David Horowitz’s Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model is very helpful in understanding what is happening in America and what is at the heart of the human struggle. It’s easy in our cultural battles to think we are waging a war between left and right, Democrats and Republicans, socialists and patriots, or other competing views.
But that is not the heart of the matter. There is a mission of destruction in the world today that not only gives meaning to the perils of the present hour, but also explains our own personal temptations and failures.
There is a universal monster that is latent in each of us. And there is a being behind that monster.
Before we divulge the source, let’s take a little tour through Horowitz’s booklet which reminded me of the truth. Horowitz is a great authority on this subject. He was once himself a communist radical.
By now it is a well known fact that Barack Obama is a follower of Saul Alinsky, the political radical who was born in Chicago in 1909 and died in California in 1972. We need to look at Saul Alinsky to comprehend the political problems that we’re facing. We also need a better understanding of our current president, Barack Obama, to make sense of his leadership over the past eighteen months.
Alinsky greatly influenced Obama. Let’s begin with our 44th president.
Barack Obama
Obama never met Alinsky personally, but he studied his political ideas and taught Alinsky’s methods. On Barack Obama’s presidential campaign web-site, according to David Horowitz, “one could see a photo of Obama in a classroom teaching students Alinskyan methods. He stands in front of a blackboard on which he has written, ‘Power Analysis and Relationships Built on Self Interest.'” These concepts were at the heart of Alinsky’s view that power was to be “seized” by appealing to man’s selfish nature. Alinsky’s famous book, Rules for Radicals, describes the many ways that communities must be “organized” to incite revolution and bring change.
Until Barack Obama became a legislator in 1996, he worked with ACORN, the largest radical organization in America which was built on the Alinsky model of organizing. The Wall Street Journal says:
“In 1991 Obama took time off from his law firm to run a voter registration drive for Project Vote…The drive registered 135,000 voters and was considered a major factor in the upset victory of Democrat Carol Moseley Braun over incumbent Democratic Senator Alan Dixon in the 1992 Senate primary. Mr. Obama’s success made him a hot commodity on the community organizing circuit. He became a top trainer at ACORN’s Chicago conferences. In 1995, he became ACORN’s attorney. In 1996, Mr. Obama filled out a questionaire listing key supporters for his campaign for the Illinois Senate. He put ACORN first (it was not an alphabetical list).”
After Barack Obama became a US Senator, his wife Michelle, told a reporter, “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” Horowitz notes that her husband commented: “I take that observation as a compliment.” Following her husband’s speech at the Democratic Convention in August, 2008, Michelle Obama summed up her husband’s vision with these words: “When Barack stood up that day, he spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about the ‘world as it is.’ and the ‘world as it should be.’ And he said that all too often we accept the distance between the two and we settle for the world as it is, even when it doesn’t reflect our values and obligations…We have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be.”
Where did Obama receive his vision? From Saul Alinsky. Alinsky says in Rules for Radicals: “As an organizer I start from the world as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be–it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working within the system.”
Now you know the origin of the phrase “Change You Can Believe In.” Obama received his vision for change from Saul Alinsky. So what did Saul Alinsky believe?
Saul Alinsky
Horowitz says that Alinsky’s “preferred self-description was ‘rebel’ and his entire life was devoted to organizing a revolution in America to destroy a system he regarded as oppressive and unjust. By profession he was a ‘community organizer,’ the same term employed by his most famous disciple, Barack Obama to describe himself.”
Alinsky came of age in the 1930s and was drawn to the world of Chicago gangsters whom he encountered professionally as a sociologist. He was a social intimate with the Al Capone mob family and though his biographer calls him an “anti-anti communist,” he had a fraternal relationship with many communist organizations. He didn’t join them them because he felt they were inflexible and dogmatic–whereas Alinsky was a political relativist. But they both shared the same goal. Alinsky said it this way: “We are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people.”
Horowitz comments, “Power is to be ‘seized’–the word is revealing. The present system will not allow justice to be realized, so sooner or later immoral, illegal, even violent means are required to achieve it.” Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals to show his fellow rebels the way. Here are the salient points that Horowitz notes in his booklet. According to Saul Alinsky:
- There are “Haves” and “Have Nots.” The “Haves” oppress the “Have Nots” and must be overthrown. Alinsky is clearly Marxian in this concept and greatly admired Vladimir Lenin.
- Everything is relative. There is no God or right and wrong. Alinsky says, “the radical organizer does not have a fixed truth – truth to him is relative and changing: everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.” Thus being a radical in the service of the masses is a license to do anything that is required to achieve that good.
- Deception is the radical’s most important weapon and it has been a prominent one since the sixties. Even though you are at war with the system, don’t confront it as an opposing army; join it and undermine it from within.
- This is a war for social justice–a heaven on earth–of social and not personal salvation. The unwavering end of the revolution is a communism of results.
But the most revealing part of Horowitz’ booklet and greatest insight into the heart and mind of Saul Alinsky, comes from Alinsky’s dedicatory page of Rules for Radicals where we find the following words: “Lest we forget, an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins–or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom– Lucifer.”
Lucifer
My jaw almost dropped when I read those words. Alinsky actually praises Satan as the first rebel/radical! Horowitz comments: “Thus Alinsky begins his text by telling readers exactly what a radical is. He is not a reformer of the system but its would-be destroyer. In his mind the radical is building his own kingdom, which to him is a kingdom on earth. Since a kingdom of heaven built by human beings is a fantasy–an impossible dream–the only radical real world efforts are those which are aimed at subverting the society he lives in. He is a nihilist.”
Horowitz, a Jew, concludes his analysis of Saul Alinsky’s political philosophy with this sober perspective: “Alinsky’s tribute to Satan as the first radical is further instructive because it reminds us that the radical illusion is an ancient one and has not changed through the millennia. Recall how Satan tempted Adam and Eve to destroy their paradise: ‘If you rebel against God’s command then you shall be as gods.’ This is the radical hubris: We can create a new world. Through our political power we can make a new race of men and women who will live in harmony and peace and according to the principles of social justice. We can be as gods.” (Emphasis is his.)
Lucifer was the first rebel/radical. His mission is to destroy. Saul Alinsky admired Satan’s rebellion and sought to duplicate it on earth. Barack Obama is an Alinsky disciple.
You and I
But they are not alone. The Bible tells us that all of us are fallen–rebels against God. Whenever we seek self-interest above the glory of God and his ways, we join in that cosmic rebellion. Dostoevsky was right. When we turn from God–rebellion, destruction and chaos are the result.
Yes, a revolution is taking place in our nation–provoked by rebel/radicals. But guard your own heart. You and I are only one choice away from the same mission of destruction.
Newt Gingrich Has It Right
I learned along time ago that unless you can define your enemies you cannot defeat them.
During my basketball playing years, when I brought the ball up-court it was critical to discern whether the opposing team was playing a zone or a man-to-man defense. If they were playing zone, you you immediately set up your zone offense. If it was man-to-man, then a whole different set of plays needed to be run.
For many years I’ve been trying to understand and properly describe the forces that are trying to tear down both the United States and Western World. In the past few years, that understanding has crystallized. I think I now understand more of the enemy and his tactics.
So does Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives. In his extremely important new book, To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular Socialist Machine, Newt gives the clearest read yet on what we face as a people.
Newt Gingrich has it right.
Will we “get it” in time to renew our nation?
First, a little history and personal reflection on Newton Leroy Gingrich, history teacher/historian, seven-term US Congressman from Georgia, leader of the Republican Revolution and TIME Person of the Year (1994) and Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1995-1999.
Newt is undoubtedly one of the most influential conservative leaders of the past thirty years. He is an expert on US history and has written a number of books on the subject (fiction and non-fiction). Through his American Solutions organization he has been a prominent idea guy on common sense policies that bring blessing to a free society. He’s probably the brightest and most experienced mind on the Republican side of the ledger.
Newt also has some flaws. He has been married three times. He first married Jackie Battley, his former high school geometry teacher. The young couple decided to divorce after Gingrich told her of an extra-marital affair while she was recovering from cancer surgery. In 1981, Newt wed Marianne Ginther until 2000 when they divorced and he married Callista Bisek, with whom he’d had an affair during his second marriage. Ironically, this particular liaison started during the Congressional investigation of Bill Clinton’s perjury relating to his affair with 23-year-old intern, Monica Lewinsky–of which Gingrich was highly critical.
This man with strong “family values” hasn’t always walked the walked.
During his time in Congress and as Speaker of the House, he was also prone to some cockiness in his leadership style which got him in trouble with the mainstream media who disliked both his approach and positions. Due to his moral and temperamental outbursts, the press was able to marginalize Newt Gingrich’s influence, which led to his resignation from Congress.
He has been re-habbing his reputation ever since–and possibly undergoing a rebirth of faith and character that is evidenced in his books and documentaries. In Nine Days That Changed the World he describes how Pope John Paul’s Christian faith was used to ignite a a fire for God in Poland which eventually brought down the Iron Curtain. In his two works called Re-Discovering God in America, Newt makes a strong case for our Christian origins and encourages us to come home.
Maybe Newt Gingrich has personally found his way back to faith and virtue. If so, his story might be similar to Thomas Jefferson’s who was probably a Deist when he was young (and cut out portions of the Bible), but seemed to grow in personal faith toward the end of his life.
At any rate, I believe that Newt Gingrich is a leader to be reckoned with in 2010 and clearly understands the enemies that America faces. They are named in the subtitle of his new book:
“Stopping Obama’s Secular Socialist Machine”
1. Stopping
Newt realizes that we are careening in a wrong direction as a nation that must be stopped in its tracks. He offers many valuable suggestions as to how to change direction. The current moral, economic, and diplomatic malaise must be halted by an enlightened and re-energized American electorate.
2. Obama’s
Gingrich understands that Barack Obama is not your normal American or American president. He is a radical progressive–a type of revolutionary–with an internationalist bent. He has a different view of God, the world, and America’s history and destiny than most past presidents and the majority of Americans today. He overly apologizes for American’s weaknesses and doesn’t appreciate our Christian underpinnings, freedoms, and exceptionalism.
3. Secular
Newt Gingrich is is the first prominent political leader to articulate the battle of worldviews currently taking place in America and the Western World. It is first a fight between Christian faith and secular religion–and secondly, with radical Islam. The Christian-secular tussle has been raging throughout America’s history, but has intensified since the 1960s when secularism became established in the government schools and atheists emboldened their stance against America’s traditional Christian faith.
Newt is prophetically correct when he says that the current administration wants to destroy any last vestiges of Christian mores and influences in our culture. The battle over “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” taking place today in Congress and pushed by the Obama Administration is one of many fronts where our current leaders are trying to force secular values down the throats of a majority Christian nation. Newt believes we need to fight back and re-discover God in America. This is a welcome call to historic Christian revival and reformation.
4. Socialist
Newt also understands what most American’s are now seeing: That those currently leading our nation are socialists who want America to become a European-style social democracy. They are expanding the reach of government at a break-neck pace, taking over control of many private industries (car companies, and some banks and financial institutions are the latest acquisitions), and want to tax and spend our nation into a dependent welfare state. It was reported today that the private sector of the American economy now accounts for only 42% of economic activity. That’s a frightening statistic to an historically free people. For socialists, it’s an encouraging sign that they are bringing “change” to America–from free enterprise to socialism.
5. Machine
Gingrich is also right on in describing the political style of the current administration as being an off-shoot of the notorious Chicago political apparatus. In fact most of its main players–including Barack Obama, Rahm Emmanuel, Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod–are products of the Chicago political establishment. They play hardball (national health care), give out bribes (Rep. Joe Sestak), and don’t tolerate criticism and dissent well (Fox News). They are a well-oiled and financed machine that can be ruthless in achieving their goals.
Newt Gingrich could have added one more word to his profound sub-title–the word:
6. Conspiracy.
No, I don’t mean any type of human conspiracy. The only conspiracy I believe in is the demonic one (Ephesians 6:12) that is operating in the world today, warring against Christ and the advance of His kingdom. It is ultimately the satanic world that is trying to erase Christianity from the public square and exalt the worship of man in the from of humanism, secularism, or world government. It is the powers of darkness who are behind the destruction of free enterprise and expression while trying to impoverish America and the world.
We need to vote out these revolutionaries–but we also need to pray out the forces that empower them.
Newt Gingrich’s new book, To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular Socialist Machine, calls the American people to return to God, faith, freedom and hope.
Now that message has a ring we can certainly believe in.