A Message from Bishop E.W. Jackson

This is a timely and convicting message for all of us to hear. Examine your conscience and pray to God to help you settle this within your heart. This message is not just a “black” message. It is a message that applies to all Christians in this nation!

The Democrats’ Strategy Of “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”

Quoting columnist Jeffrey Folks:

“Lenin famously described his strategy for communist domination as ‘one step forward, two steps back.’ Of course, by that he did not mean to suggest steps of equal length. The step forward was a lot more like two large steps, and the two steps back were more or less symbolic, designed to diffuse opposition. Clearly, in the past two years the United States has moved two giant steps in the direction of socialism. We have seen the redistribution of hundreds of billions of dollars, the seizure of major industries by the state, the re-emergence of a hard-core welfare state, the virtual nationalization of healthcare, takeover by regulation of the energy and financial sectors, and much more. This resurgence of state control has been accompanied by the new power of labor unions, environmental lobbyists, tort lawyers, and state bureaucracies. But now, having reached the limit of what the public will stomach, the Leninists who run the Democratic Party see that it is time for two baby-steps back. Those steps back are taking the form of a new suggestion of inclusiveness and bipartisanship (even of openness to business interests), talk of repeal of some parts of the healthcare bill, talk of making some parts of the Bush tax cuts permanent (after the election, of course), talk of a balanced budget (pay-go once again). As this list suggests, the step back is nearly all talk-talk in the midst of an election campaign designed to preserve Democratic majorities. The steps back, in other words, are not an actual retreat. They are merely talk. As soon as the election is over, the strategy of moving forward will resume — this time in the lame-duck session of Congress.”

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The New American Aristocracy

Angelo Codevilla

Angelo M. Codevilla has written a brilliant essay titled, “America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution”. It exposes the development of a powerful American social class, made up of politicians from both national parties. They do not represent the voters who elected them, but instead represent a worldview which they believe must be imposed upon the citizens of our country. Codevilla writes:

Our ruling class’s agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a “machine,” that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels’ wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges — civic as well as economic — to the party’s clients, directly or indirectly. This, incidentally, is close to Aristotle’s view of democracy. Hence our ruling class’s standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government — meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class’s solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling and global warming. A priori, one might wonder whether enriching and empowering individuals of a certain kind can make Americans kinder and gentler, much less control the weather. But there can be no doubt that such power and money makes Americans ever more dependent on those who wield it. Let us now look at what this means in our time.

By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices — even to buy in the first place — modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency’s value for all.

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting univocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others. Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don’t have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.

By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support.

Read this entire article. . . .