32. Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act: This act instituted in 1933 required the separation of commercial and investment banks. Its repeal in
1999 was one of the key factors leading to the breakdown of the residential mortgage investment sector. Senators John McCain and Maria Cantwell are proposing to reinstate it. This needs to be done while also eliminating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
33. Re-instate the Wall Street “Uptick” Rule: We saw what happened when hedge fund raiders, according to one report, manipulated and rocked the stock market on May 6, 2010, causing a thousand-point drop before recovering.10 This is why we must end the practice of short selling. The “uptick rule” must be reinstated while putting into place trading curbs. Congress and the SEC should conduct hearings and pass new safeguards to prevent a future meltdown, although this may be just a Band-Aid that masks the crisis du jour. Wall Street firms hire some of the brightest young minds, hand them supercomputers, and then cut them loose on the exchanges. However, while they produce billions in revenue through their trading, they contribute nothing of material substance to our society. This pursuit of quick financial gain leads to artificial bubbles, inflated valuation of stocks, more crises and, in the end, the potential for widespread abuse—if not the end of the capitalist system, which enabled this country to become so great.
34. Privatize the Regulation of Wall Street: Since Congress is unlikely to look beyond the millions of campaign dollars flowing from Wall Street and enact comprehensive reform, we must privatize the regulation of the financial industry, rather than allow it to become further entangled in the corrupt web that the government oligarchy is quickly proving to be. That should include creating a private clearing house for the oversight of financial derivative debt instruments.
35. Encourage Risk Taking and Entrepreneurship: Reward those “makers” who provide the jobs that drive the economy. The unparalleled success of capitalism is built on risk taking by small businesses. Obama was right to temporarily eliminate fees charged to lenders who participate in the Small Business Administration loan program. This move should be made permanent while cutting unnecessary regulation that stifles entrepreneurial endeavors.
36. Institute Tort Reform: Tort reform must be instituted for medical malpractice to curb frivolous lawsuits by the Briefcase Mafia and stop out-of-control awards for damages. Medical liability should be capped at
$250,000 per claim. This has worked in California, where it was introduced in 1978. If passed, tort reform legislation will reduce the legal industry’s inordinate influence in raising medical costs.
37. Run the Country Like a Business, Not an Empire: We cannot blame President Obama for the entire economic morass we are in. However, as any homeowner knows, if you have $100,000 in debt at the end of the year you don’t eliminate that $100,000 debt by incurring $300,000 additional debt, which your children will have to pay for. Instead, you pay down that debt by cutting unnecessary expenses. Maybe you have fewer vacations, drive one car rather than two, and eat out less often. That’s known as belt-tightening—a simple principle bureaucrats can’t seem to grasp. As such, we must stop them from further federal bailouts and “stimulus” packages altogether.
Getting Back to Basics
In truth, this is just a place to start. Much more can and should be done. It’s no secret, for example, that the secular humanism—the insistence that human beings are the center of the universe and the final arbiters of right and wrong—is the religion of choice for libs. It’s a spin-off from Marxism, developed by godless communists to justify a self-centered view of the world, one where the State is God. However, if you read through the documents upon which this country was founded, and if you read the writings of the founding fathers, you’ll realize that the real basis of our existence as a nation is a contract with the Judeo-Christian God. It’s time that we renew that contract.
Here’s how Benjamin Franklin put it in a speech during the Constitutional Convention on June 28, 1787:
In the beginning of the contest with Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayers in this room for the divine protection. Our prayers, Sir, were heard; and they were graciously answered. All of us, who were engaged in the struggle, must have observed frequent instances of a superintending Providence in our favor. To that kind Providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we
now forgotten that powerful friend? Or do we imagine we no longer need its assistance? I have lived, Sir, a long time; and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, That God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? 11
It’s time that we begin to revisit and reestablish the religious and moral principles that flow from the Old and New Testaments of the Bible and from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—principles that have enabled us to become the great nation we are today. No, I’m not suggesting we turn America into a theocracy. Rather, this means that we would do well to put our religious beliefs into practice in such a way that we cleanse our national soul of the immoral and degrading cultural practices that have done our country such enormous harm.
This is not something that can take place exclusively through legislation, although there are legislative initiatives that can help it take root and succeed. Primarily, though, it is something that each of us must begin to do in our own homes and lives. It’s time to make a concerted effort to bring God back into the public discourse, not for the purpose of establishing a religious state but for the purpose of re-centering our nation, of re-alerting ourselves and our fellow Americans to what is right.
As I said at the outset of this book, this isn’t a picnic.
It’s a showdown.
The question remains: Whose vision of America will win the day?
Barack Hussein Obama, the reverse Robin Hood, who takes from the middle class and gives to the rich, is causing an economic poverty, as well as a poverty of the body, mind, and spirit. His radical, hard-left agenda and Marxist-Leninist worldview is impoverishing how we think, feel, and view ourselves as a people while robbing our personal freedoms and bankrupting our clout as the leader of the world.
We can and must do better.
One Day After Eating Chinese Food
The other day while working on this book, I took a break for some fresh air and a bite to eat. I’m walking along the streets of San Fransicko looking at the shops and the people milling about in the sunshine. I decide to stop in at the Chinese restaurant that I love to hate. You know how it is. You get used to certain routines and this is one of them for me. It’s where I get my grease fix. I’ve been going for years, even though the owners don’t know my name.
They just glare at me until I order.
So, I fill up on the chicken and broccoli with the pot stickers. Now I’ve got enough indigestion to last me for the rest of the week. Back outside, I’m moving along the sidewalk just minding my own business. I turn the corner and head toward North Beach, past the playground with kids having a ball and the steak house with the bad food. A few blocks later, I see a black man sitting at a card table with an Asian lady passing out literature. What caught my eye was the huge homemade sign: “IMPEACH OBAMA.”
I’m thinking, this I gotta see.
I stop and talk and read the pamphlets. They didn’t know who I was or what my political positions were. I asked them, “What’s this about?” They said they were running a Democrat against Nancy Pelosi for Congress. The black man vehemently opposed Obama’s policies. He called Obama and the Democrats in Congress a “pack of complete frauds” and offered his ideas of what must be done to fix things in Washington.
As I walked away, I thought about the simplicity and beauty of what I had just experienced. Sure, I may disagree with him on some of his solutions. But I identified with him on a basic level. We’re both Americans. We both
know the system is broken. We both love our country. And, like him, I’m one man who exercises my freedom of expression every day, giving voice to my ideas of how to fix the system. His platform was a card table on the street corner. My platform happens to be behind a microphone and in the pages of my books.
All of us have a platform.
All of us must speak out wherever that platform may be.
For you, that might be the PTA, a civic group, a gathering of home-school parents, the water cooler at work, or standing with the Tea Party movement. You don’t have to be a “professional speaker,” a political wonk, or a candidate running for office to make a difference. Each of us has a voice. I say, use it or lose it. What’s more, you don’t have to address all the solutions that I’ve proposed. This isn’t an all-or-nothing strategy. Pick one or two that resonates with you.
But whatever you do, fight for the country while there’s time to save it.
Frankly, I’ve been engaged in this fight for years.
While I wouldn’t take credit for sparking the Tea Party movement, we must not forget there have been others, including myself, who were involved in conservative rallies for many years. I held mass gatherings of discontented conservatives and independents dating back to 1996. That’s when I started The Paul Revere Society and hosted five compassionate conservative conventions in the late 1990s. I held a “Name ‘em and Shame ‘em” event in the 2000. In 2003, in my New York Times bestseller, The Enemy Within, I concluded by calling for a conservative revolution. And then, in 2004, I rallied conservatives at the Concord Pavilion in California.
Which is to say I’m encouraged to see fresh signs that a revolution is brewing.
No doubt the Tea Party movement of today has drawn some of its inspiration from the Boston Tea Party protest, which pre-figured the American Revolution. In my case, I drew inspiration from Paul Revere, the simple craftsman who rode through the night in 1775 to let sleeping Americans know that the British were coming. I’ve been warning that the enemy was coming for sixteen years, and I will continue to raise the alarm every day until this cancer has been expunged from the soul of America.
Each president puts his own stamp on the White House. This president seems to stamp on the White House!
When the natural love of country is repressed, or lost, pan-Leninism emerges. Without nationalism, pan-Leninism appears. Not a “New world order” of harmony. But a new world tyranny managed by a few invisible hands.
If I have to be the last angry man who speaks out, so be it. Then I shall go out with a roar because I will fight against trickle up poverty and for the American middle class that I represent. The America that I speak to. The America that speaks to me. The Savage Nation.
EPILOGUE
From Trickle Up Poverty to Trickle Up Oil
The left wing has turned on Barack Obama—not because of his Marxist agenda, not because of his socialist czars and advisors, not because he’s causing trickle up poverty. No. The left wing has finally turned on Obama because he failed their nature religion.
On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew and spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Clear thinking Americans knew that quick action was required if there would be any hope of saving 40% of America’s most fragile wetlands as well as the fishing industries whose livelihood and existence were immediately threatened.
In a stunning display of ineptitude, Obama did nothing—except to go on a spring vacation to Asheville, North Carolina, even as the oil barreled into the Gulf of Mexico.
It took Obama twelve days before he visited the site of the worst oil spill catastrophe in our history and provided no immediate leadership or action. At first the compliant press gave him a pass—the same press which had blasted George W. Bush for waiting four days before he visited New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. But then Obama took a second vacation while the oil continued to destroy the environment.
That’s when the Gulf oil spill became Obama’s Katrina. Why?
Because Barack Obama failed his core followers in their religion of the environment. You must understand the mind of progressive socialists and many on the left. To them the environment is their religion. Their religion isn’t that of Abraham, Moses, or Jesus Christ. Their religion is the religion of Gaia. Fundamentally, they’re nature worshippers and Barack Obama was their messiah who could not only walk on water but part the Red Sea.
However, due to Obama’s feckless leadership, their sacred idols—the birds, the clams, the fish, the shrimp, and every mollusk in the bay—were threatened. Many of their sacred icons were dying in record numbers because the government under Obama did nothing except play the blame game. While Obama insisted this catastrophe was BP’s problem, everyone knew Obama could have immediately called on the US Army Corps of Engineers to plug the leak and contain the spill.
Making matters worse was Obama’s failure to immediately authorize barrier berms to block the oil from reaching the coastline. When Louisiana officials requested permission to build them, the Obama administration was silent for weeks on end. Nor did Obama request assistance from Japan, France, Russia or China, all of whom have deep sea submarines and robots with the capacity of working as deep as a mile below the surface of the ocean.
That’s when it became apparent to even the most ardent Democrat Obama worshipper that their messiah had abandoned them. The scales finally fell from their eyes and they saw that Obama was mortal. They were forced to admit there was no excuse for Obama to take 38 days before making a speech regarding the biggest environmental disaster since the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown.
That’s when they attacked.
At first the backlash was contained to small newspaper columns and a few talk shows. Then, at the first news conference which the messiah had held in over 10 months, as if a dam had burst the formally fawning press acknowledged that not only could Obama not part the Red Sea and lead them to Nirvana, but he couldn’t even part the black sea of sludge that decimated hundreds of miles of the Gulf Coast and the ocean for decades to come.
You may wonder why Obama took so long to respond.
The answer is really quite simple and it reveals much about what he thinks of middle America. The reason Obama finally called the press conference and reluctantly squeezed in a three hour visit to the state (which is less time than he spends on the golf course) wasn’t because he cared about the people of Louisiana. After all, Louisiana voted for John McCain in 2008. Obama knew they didn’t support his socialist policies so in his mind he had little to gain by making their plight his priority. In short, he could care less since there was nothing to gain politically.
Look at it this way. If a pregnant whale was about to give birth in San Francisco Bay and someone had spilled one gallon of used motor oil in the water, I can guarantee that there would have been hysteria in the White House. Obama would have been out there in Air Force One within several hours. He would have brought with him a specialized team from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to cordon off the oil spill.
There would be no way Obama would allow that one gallon of oil to either poison the whale or to wash ashore in San Francisco—the liberal Mecca of America. That’s his core audience. That’s the crowd he plays to. To Obama, Louisiana isn’t liberal country. It’s Deliverance Country. It’s a bunch of toothless guys wandering around down there. Why should he bother with them?
That was a gross miscalculation on Obama’s part. When the oil continued to desecrate the sacred idols of Gaia, and as he continued to betray the religion of his gullible followers, even his minions were forced to cry out against their false messiah and demand that he do something.
I believe this represents a historic turning point. The sheeple on the left and in the press are finally waking up. They’re asking the hard questions and writing the probing columns which should have been done by them long before Obama was ushered into the seat of power. They’re even publicly admitting that they were wrong to have backed Obama, as columnist Daniel Hannan h
as done. He writes:
I was wrong … none of [Obama’s] advantages, however, can make up for the single most important fact of Obama’s presidency, namely that the federal government is 30 percent larger than it was two years ago. This is not entirely Obama’s fault, of course. The credit crunch occurred during the dying days of the Bush administration, and it was the 43rd president who began the baleful policy of bail-outs and pork-barrel stimulus packages.12
He’s right about that. I’ve been critical of the way Bush broke the system. That said, Bush is a piker when compared to what Obama has done—and is doing—to trash our economy. He continues:
But it was Obama who massively extended that policy against united Republican opposition. It was he who chose, in defiance of public opinion, to establish a state-run healthcare system. It was he who presumed to tell private sector employees what they could earn, he who adopted the asinine cap-and-trade rules, and he who re-federalised social security, thereby reversing the single most beneficial reform of the Clinton years.13
As I said at the outset of this book, Obama is a pan-Leninist. He’s operating on a global level and, as Hannan points out, the future Obama envision isn’t pretty:
These errors [by Obama] are not random. They amount to a comprehensive strategy of Europeanisation: Euro-carbon taxes, Euro-disarmament, Euro-healthcare, Euro-welfare, Euro-spending levels, Euro-tax levels and, inevitably, Euro-unemployment levels. Any American reader who wants to know where Obamification will lead should spend a week with me in the European Parliament. I’m working in your future and, believe me, you won’t like it.14
In that respect, Obama is proving to be one of the most dangerously inexperienced presidents to occupy the Oval Office. He knew how to run a campaign, but he has no idea how to run a government. Yet his incompetence hasn’t stopped—or even slowed—him from pursuing his radical agenda to fundamentally transform America. However, I believe this mishandling of the Gulf oil spill could be the downfall, not only of Obama, but the entire left wing of the Democrat party. For the sake of the country and for the benefit of the entire world, let’s hope this is the beginning of the end of the reign of Obama the Destroyer.
Trickle Up Poverty: Stopping Obama’s Attack on Our Borders, Economy, and Security Page 38