Steve Collins
October 29, 2007
A few readers may recognize the title of this blog as the title of an Alan Drury political novel from perhaps a couple decades ago (that is why the title of this blog is in quotation marks). Alan Drury wrote the best-selling book “Advise and Consent,” which was later made into a movie. I bought his book, Come Nineveh, Come Tyre, but I couldn’t finish reading it as it was too depressing. It was a Cold-war scenario about how the USA succumbed to the Soviet Union due to the foolish and pacifistic policies of a bumbling President and Congress. In the book, what convinced the Soviets that the USA had lost the will to resist was that the USA refused to defend its own borders (the book placed an unresisted incursion in Alaska). The book’s title was a reference to the fact that all ancient empires and kingdoms, powerful though they were in their heyday, eventually fell. This book’s title has been coming back to me more and more as President Bush and the Congress refuse to defend our southern border with Mexico. A nation which won’t defend the sovereignty of its borders is a nation in very serious decline.
Witness how Turkey is vigorous about defending its border against the Kurdish PKK. India and Pakistan are zealous about defending their borders against each other. I’ve stood at the northern border of Israel with Lebanon and I’ve peered through the security fence which separates those two nations. Nations should be zealous about their borders, but the USA’s leaders refuse to defend or secure the USA’s borders. In their inept and lackadaisical border policy, President Bush and Congress are signaling to the world a very deep weakness of purpose and resolve. Iran sees it and grows bolder. China sees it and grows bolder. Russia sees it and grows bolder as well. All nations see it and they realize that something has gone deeply wrong in the USA. President Bush’s “porous borders” policy repudiates any and all his words of resolve that are spoken on the world scene. Enemy nations also see the USA exhausting its own military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and not doing anything meaningful to rebuild the size of its ground forces. The US dollar is beginning to slide quickly on world markets, and if the Federal Reserve Board lowers interest rates again in its imminent meeting, the dollar will plunge even lower.
As the US dollar loses its value, it becomes easier for foreign firms and investment funds to, literally, buy up the assets of American firms at steadily lower prices as denominated in their foreign currencies. If the dollar drops precipitously at some point in the future, much of America could be bought up by foreigners in a short period of time, and American independence will, effectively, end. If you have not done so yet, I urge readers to do a web search of the terms “North American Union (NAU),” NAFTA Superhighway” and the “Amero.” The NAU is an entity which could easily come into being if the USA is “merged” into a North American Union with Canada and Mexico when the US dollar loses so much value that it ceases to function as a serious world currency. The Amero is, apparently, the name of the new currency which could replace the US dollar. I hope this doesn’t happen, but it becomes a more plausible scenario as the US dollar steadily loses value and the USA’s border with Mexico loses any real meaning.
I’m not the only seeing such dangers. The link below offers J.R. Nyquist’s latest column at www.financialsense.com. His column is entitled “The Downward Trend is Unstoppable,” and he writes “the United States is headed into a crisis of unprecedented proportions.” He lists five great problems in the American economy which increasingly have no solution, and he aptly states “We are addicted to debt.”
Debt is destroying the well-being of not just the nation, but also companies, local governments and families. All are addicted to debt. Americans seem to think the Federal government has an inexhaustible money tree somewhere. Foolish Senators and Representatives spend mega-billions of dollars on silly projects in an effort to extract as much pork as possible from the swollen federal budget for their home states and districts. People love it when this happens, heedless of the fact that Congress is borrowing the money for all that pork from China and other foreign nations. All that pork-barrel and earmark spending is sentencing our children and grandchildren to a future financial servitude (or worse) to foreign bosses and overseers. If you have not done so, I urge you to read my article, “What Kind of Captivity?”, available at this website as it addresses this very danger in light of biblical precedents.
Proverbs 22:7 warns that “borrowers are servants to lenders.” This is true in all ages. The Bible warns against the power of debt to enslave a people. God instituted a “Jubilee Year” every 50 years in ancient Israel to regularly eliminate debt from the society of ancient Israel. Deuteronomy 28 lists many blessings God promised to bestow on the Israelites if they obeyed his laws. Verse 12 states one of these blessings would be that the Israelites would “lend unto many nations and you shall not borrow.” Conversely, great indebtedness is a curse upon a foolish and disobedient nation. The USA was once the world’s greatest creditor nation and that state of affairs existed when the USA still honored God and many of his ways of life. Increasingly, the USA mocks and defies God and his laws, virtually daring him to “do something about it.” If the USA continues its mindlessly foolish economic policies of debt inflation, God won’t have to do anything because the American economy will eventually self-destruct on its own.
No US Government is likely to admit the truth of what is happening, and economic “experts” will be full of “happy talk” about how great things are. However, the lies are getting so huge that millions (in my view) now see through them. Glenn Beck, on his TV program on CNN-Headline News, recently stated (and I’ll paraphrase) that “The Government lies about everything.” The unemployment statistics have been a joke for many years as the government slants the data by “deciding” how many of the unemployed should be counted as “discouraged workers” who don’t get counted as unemployed any more. The Jobs Data is deeply deceptive because it takes no account of the quality of jobs. For example, If a manufacturing plant closes and a person loses his/her $50,000 a year job and has to work two low-paying, $18,000 a year retail jobs to make ends meet, the government data counts this as a gain of two jobs and a lose of one job so, statistically, this indicates the economy is improving even though it really isn’t. The inflation data grossly understates the real world rate of inflation due to bizarre “hedonic” adjustments which manipulate the real numbers to produce an inflation rate which is far lower than the real rate. This means workers whose wage increases are tied to the CPI data fall further behind financially every year. If you wish to have a full explanation of how the official CPI numbers are “rigged,” you can see an explanation of this statistical scam at www.shadowstats.com. A reader sent me a link (also provided below) to an article posted at an investment website with a germane comment on the unreliable CPI data by Larry Lindsey, a former economic advisor to President Bush. Mr. Lindsey was reported as stating that the CPI data was so unreliable that “anyone in business should definitely not rely on it.”
The sub-prime mortgage collapse and the housing crisis deserve a special comment. I’m sure you are all familiar with the fact that housing starts and sales have dropped dramatically due to the credit crisis and that housing prices are dropping widely across the USA. However, the “official” government data reported that “sales of new homes rose 4.8%” in September (as reported in USA Today in its 10-27-07 issue). This official data was so ridiculous that even the USA Today’s article about it (“New Homes Rise Unexpectedly,” p. B1) noted that “analysts were highly skeptical, given the credit crunch, and predicted further sales declines.” It’s about time that the mainstream media commented on the dubious nature of “official” US economic data. Congratulations to the USA Today for printing that statement. The same article reported that the “official” home sales data was “revised…sharply lower” in each of the last three months. Obviously the Government is trying to present a rosy picture of things in the initial reports (which get much publicity) and then the reports gets “revised” closer to the truth later (with little fanfare).
I urge you to read the J.R. Nyquist link below. As a reader of this blog, there is no reason why you should be unaware of the growing dangers to the health (if not the survival) of the US economy.
I think I threw away my old copy of Alan Drury’s Come Nineveh, Come Tyre. It seemed a ridiculously impossible plot at the time. How could the USA ever become so weak that it refused to secure its own borders? How could the US let its superpower military atrophy? For that matter, how could the mighty USA mismanage its economy so badly that it could become the world’s largest debtor (i.e. “deadbeat”) nation? I now have the sick feeling that aspects of Drury’s book are coming to pass in today’s modern America.
http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/geo/pastanalysis/2007/1026.html
http://www.gata.org/node/5667
