Steering America into Disaster: Obama Radicalism and Public Complacency

 

Mike Scruggs

By late in the evening of April 14, 1912, the crew of the RMS Titanic had received eight iceberg warnings from six different ships. Most unfortunately, they were not heeded. Some of the iceberg warnings were not even reported to the bridge. An attitude of complacent confidence in ship and crew prevailed. Near midnight, going at close to full speed, her lookouts spotted a huge iceberg dead ahead. Unable to alter her course and speed in time, the Titanic struck and scraped against the iceberg on her starboard side. Within three hours that magnificent ship, thought by many to be unsinkable, sank into a watery grave, carrying 1,503 of her passengers and crew with her.

Complacency is often the father of disaster. Most people are reluctant to believe that their lives could be radically changed for the worse by government policies that the mainstream media are either praising or helping to obscure. Media and public inattention to government policies and actions are equivalent to ignoring iceberg warnings.

President Barack Obama has been steering the United States into economic, social, military, and foreign policy disaster for nearly four years. Political author Norman Podhoretz describes him as a “lethal combination of incompetence and radicalism” that has made him “into one of the worst presidents in American History.” Yet according to several polls, over 47 percent of a complacent and poorly informed American electorate is ready to re-elect him president.       

Podhoretz’s assessment of Obama’s dismal economic record is substantiated by 43 straight months with the U-3 Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment rate over 8.0 percent. But the U-3 rate significantly under-reports unemployment. Obama claims to have created 4.5 million jobs, but the net job creation over his term in office is only 415,000, considerably less than what would have been created by population growth. In fact, the labor participation rate of 63.5 percent is at the lowest level in over 30 years. The American workforce has been reduced by a net 5.0 million workers. This indicates that the real unemployment rate is closer to 11.5 percent than the reported 8.2 percent. The less familiar U-6 rate, which includes both those who have become too discouraged to look for work and those forced to part-time, is over 15 percent.  There are 23 million Americans looking for a full-time job but cannot find one. Yet there are 8.2 million illegal immigrants holding jobs in the U.S, and Obama is unlawfully passing out several million amnesties for them. This is an outrage, but Obama does not care about jobs for American workers; he cares about making illegal immigrants into grateful new Democrat voters.

Obama and the Democrats have failed in their responsibility to provide annual budgets. Federal spending has exceeded Federal revenues by deficits exceeding $1.0 trillion in every year of his term, and the national debt is now $16 trillion, exceeding the total annual production of the U.S. economy. How are we going to pay it off? On September 13, the Federal Reserve made a desperate move to “fix the job situation” by introducing a new stimulus package that will buy $40 billion in mortgage bonds monthly for an indefinite period. This will cause the price of bonds to rise and interests rates to fall, resulting in an increase in the money supply, when we are already running up huge fiscal deficits and the national debt. This inflation of the money supply is the equivalent of just printing more money. Using monetary inflation as an economic “stimulus” is going to be a heavy burden on retired people and others on fixed income. In fact, it will hurt the vast majority of American workers and small businesses.

Both Governor Romney and Texas Republican Ron Paul have indicated substantial disagreement with Fed Chairman Bernanke’s new policy, which seems designed to create a short-term illusion of economic recovery for the benefit of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. But after the election, we will be stuck with its real and painful consequences. Such a policy will devalue the dollar. It is a dangerous step towards the ruinous hyperinflation that devastated Germany from 1919 to 1923.

Job losses and looming inflation are reason enough to send Obama packing on Election Day.  His foreign policy and efforts to cover up the dangers of Islamic radicalism and the Muslim Brotherhood range between inept and insane disregard for American security.  On the inept side, he let the “Arab Democratic Spring” turn into a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt, endangering the security of Israel. In other actions, he has had the Defense Department and FBI purge any documents that Muslim reviewers considered a negative stereotype of Islam. Jihad can no longer be defined as “Holy War,” and Army training courses on radical Islam have been cancelled. The Justice Department is now considering making “Islamophobia” or any criticism of Islam a hate crime. First Amendment religious freedom for Christians is being pushed aside to appease U.S. Muslim Brotherhood front organizations and the Saudi-based 56-nation Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Last December, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked with the OIC to find ways to enforce a United Nations resolution to fight Islamophobia in the United States and other Western nations.

Most of the American media has been ignoring the iceberg warnings signaled by Obama’s autocratic radicalism. They routinely bury any embarrassing signs of inept decision-making.  Thus the public is poorly informed and ill prepared to discern the dangers of Obama’s radical agenda or to evaluate his management competence. The resultant public complacency portends calamity. Like the RMS Titanic, America is moving toward a high-speed collision with reality. Re-electing Barack Hussein Obama president will sink American freedom, prosperity, and security, probably forever.