The New Nationalism--How The Next Great American Debate Will Restore Our Country By Recasting Our Politics

significant.

INTRODUCTION

{The following is the text of a letter written by the author and sent jointly in the opening days of 2006 to Ms. Bay Buchanan of The American Cause and Ms. Lori Wallach of Public Citizen, two prominent Washington-area political advocacy groups, which, although from opposite sides of the ideological spectrum, share many of the views herein contained. They also received a copy of the first edition of this book}

I am taking the unusual step of writing to both of you jointly because I believe the way forward in American politics lies in a coalition of anti-globalists that would speak for the interests of the forgotten American people. This coalition would strongly oppose both Bush’s American Empire, which threatens America’s future with imperial overreach even as it further drains our debt-ridden treasury, and Clinton/Kerry’s Global Economy, which produced the very terror the Empire is sworn to defeat as well as instigated our economic decline. Although both of you head separate organizations that are now veterans in the fight against Globalism, there is not now any effort to unite natural allies because of the harsh left vs. right divide that characterizes our politics today.

Your own experience will surely attest to the sad fact that this bitter divide ends up causing liberal and conservative dissenters from the global agenda to support those with whom they have deep and profound disagreements. The dirty little secret is how those who feel strongly about social issues end up being used by the image-makers employed by both parties to cover up their consensus on political issues – a consensus to which many on both sides of the cultural divide would mutually object. We must strive to heal the breach in our culture even as we dedicate ourselves to bring discord to the global agenda which helped to divide our culture in the first place. Without doing the former, we have no chance of accomplishing the latter. Culture wars thrive whenever a people’s fundamental unity becomes dissipated by pursuits inimical to the common good. A new form of Nationalism can both unite the separate anti-global efforts into one complete whole and detour our path away from a frightening future, as it is the powers and the prerogatives of the nation-state as a sovereign entity that are assaulted by the trade, defense, foreign, economic and border policies of the status quo. It is the ties that bind a nation’s citizens together that are routed when our leaders respond that the War on Terror will never be won, that our borders can never be secured, that the manufacturing jobs are never coming back, that our culture will forever remain divided. Despite the present overdue focus on security, the ultimate choice we face is no longer whether we should have a big or a small national government, but whether we should have any effective national government at all. It isn’t only the people of New Orleans who have been abandoned by their government – in so many ways a majority of Americans have also been cut adrift.

The documents which follow are the result of an almost seven year effort on my part to craft a specific argument and a general creed that could help to form this new political alliance whose ultimate goal would be to recast America’s liberal vs. conservative politics and replace it instead with a nationalist vs. globalist debate. Our current campaigns offer us only a Hobson’s choice because the present system is focused on issues that distract us from the challenges America faces: How to secure the American homeland in light of the terrorist threat when all authority is held by forces determined to continue their global pursuits; how to restore our declining middle class and reform our two-tiered economy when all our powers have been ceded to those same global interests that have precipitated these very results? This is an argument no one else is making. This is an argument that would return American politics to the traditional question of Who should govern us? – a question that implicates the division of power rather than the use of power. This is an argument that focuses on enduring questions of rights, duties and loyalties, as opposed to the heated but often, in the larger scheme of things, transitory passions present in the current division. This is an argument that also seeks a traditional political realignment, driven not by ideology or by culture, but by economics and allegiance. This is an argument that has the potential to combine both of your efforts into a new political majority.

Neither party is now responsive to the needs of the American people. As both are in thrall to the global elite, a candidate with an anti-global platform can win neither’s nomination. None of our recent elections have even broached the serious issues we continue to face. In 1988 when we were bleeding jobs and the trade deficit was setting new records, our political leaders were proposing more free trade agreements while debating only flag burning and the ACLU. Eight years later, in 1996, when we were being inundated with millions of foreign migrants, they sung the praises of a borderless world while they debated metaphors about bridges in time. Eight years after that, in the election that took place only two years ago, when our military was chasing the wrong enemy abroad, our foreign policy alienating people around the globe and our country wide open for terrorist retaliation, we debated Vietnam. These are the same campaigns that always end up with administrations of both parties further sacrificing our own interests in favor of global pursuits. Despite all of these disturbing trends, their tone-deaf message that tomorrow will still be better remains unchallenged, for real political debate has been curtailed in favor of circus sideshows and tabloid distractions.

Events move at their own pace, whether or not we are prepared to deal with them. We will soon stand at the edge of a great decision: How shall we rein in these global forces which have unchecked and unjustified power over us? America and the rest of the world could give up what is left of our freedom and create more and bigger international entities and tame the global corporations with global government. Or America and the rest of the world could recapture these escaped enterprises and bring them to heel by renationalizing our societies and reclaiming our destinies as distinct peoples. But the American people will be robbed of the opportunity of making such a choice unless the political divide is realigned to highlight the very basic question of Who should govern us? That age old question is again what is at stake today. Making its invocation a familiarity constitutes the immediate mission of this effort. Divergent answers to the question of who should hold power as opposed to divergent answers to the question of what our private, personal beliefs should be – aren’t they the very archetype of the kind of question that should inform our basic political division?

Invoking America’s historic beginnings, this re-declaration of independence comes down strongly on behalf of a world of sovereign nations rather than a world of sovereign corporations or a world of global empires. This is the cause that will engage the electorate rather than distract it. As to this monumental decision which encompasses nearly all of the overriding challenges we will face in the future, there are no liberals; there are no conservatives. There are only Nationalists and Globalists. Isn’t a change in focus long overdue when American internationalism is continually defeated by the nationalism of others – yesterday in Vietnam, today in Iraq, tomorrow maybe within our own land?

Almost one hundred and fifty years ago, two-thirds of a million Americans died for the proposition that all Americans were bound together in an inseverable Union, one not divisible into North and South or black and white. The lasting legacy of Shiloh, of Antietam and of Gettysburg was that the legal fictions known as states were not free to leave the Union. If the legal fictions known as states were not then free to leave, why should the legal fictions known as corporations, creations of the legal fictions known as states, why, oh why should they be free to do what the states themselves cannot? Their passport into the global market has been our undoing. They have been elevated to a status ranking higher than anything else, exploiting nations and their people for their own advantage. They have opened our borders to anything and anyone that wanted to cross in either direction. Though they have done their best to sunder the ties of our Union, people throughout the world are naturally bonded to those with whom they share a common history, a common culture, a common destiny, and, above all, the common endeavor that best defines a nation.

If one really believes in freedom and in liberty, if one really is committed to democracy, there is great appeal in the new form of Nationalism that emerges in the pages that follow. In clear distinction to the old forms of Nationalism that sought only national aggrandizement (or a splendid isolation in a world that no longer exists), this new enlightened Nationalism seeks to preserve the independence of the world’s peoples and presents an alternative to the empire-builders that define both today’s dominant Neo-conservatives and New Democrats. Far from cobbling together the separate objections of the left and the right, the proposed charter stands on its own accord. I can only hope that those who examine and ponder it find that it is as cohesive as it is comprehensive, and that it is as compelling as it is coherent. An America with an expanding middle class, fiscal and financial sanity, a stable and a healthy environment, secure borders, a common culture unimpeded by objections because it tolerates and cherishes the right to dissent from its precepts, and a political system where different visions rather than different illusions compete for the people’s favor are not the whispered wishes of an impossible dream for we have been there before.

A compact for this new political alliance destined to wage the campaigns of the future begins with a survey of our country today, focusing on our economy, where the false optimism of both parties is belied by the miserable fact that in the last three decades only the elite 20% have prospered and all the rest of us have retreated into debt and into poverty. Because of an eroding middle class, and a decline in both (economic) standard of living and (environmental) quality of life, this survey soon becomes a stinging indictment against an economy cannibalizing its own limited success, a society hopelessly split in two, and a political system broken so long ago it is now able to offer only the failed policies of today’s status quo. Though their resources are mighty, their failure is manifest. The empire builders dominant in both parties seek to unite the world but they cannot even succeed in uniting this country.

Many of the present prevailing conceptions and circumstances that would ostensibly block this new progressive/conservative alliance are reconstructed by reviewing how we came to where we are today when Nationalism is widely felt but rarely articulated. In a reassessment of our political history, where no widely accepted fact is doubted or diminished, but where several accepted conclusions lose their exemption from any fresh analysis, today’s various political factions are reassembled and the division recapitulated in order to form a new ensemble that will give Nationalism its voice and ground its legitimacy in a perspective that cannot be dismissed as a fringe. To avoid our present fate, the left and the right must unite, especially now that the middle is owned by plutocratic forces no longer connected to the well being of our country. For all those many forgotten Americans who presently find few if any champions to fight for their cause, there is no other practical alternative. Tracing the history of Globalism and the trajectory of modern America grounds this new alliance in American political traditions, and provides the pedigree of legitimacy essential to defeating the efforts sure to come to dismiss it out of hand. It also allows for the distillation of the Neo-conservative from the conservative and the New Democrat from the liberal. Suddenly the either/or simplicity indigenous to the deadlock of recent times disappears. There then reappear the four basic strains of American politics, two different types of liberals and two different types of conservatives, out of which new coalitions and a new politics can be born.

Evaluating contemporary events on a historical or generational rather than an ideological basis produces conclusions quite separate and apart from those commonly heard today, but one that rings true to any who have observed or participated in public life in recent years. Only in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate did a caustic liberal vs. conservative slugfest begin to characterize our politics. Re-examining these splits in American society highlights the links yesterday’s counter-culture has to today’s international business and the harm both have done to our country, just as it ties today’s real liberals and true conservatives together in a common past, a shared agenda for the present and a path to power in the future.

A little girl holding a sign that read Bring Us Together captured Richard Nixon’s attention in 1968. As president, Mr. Nixon remained unable to achieve that innocent sentiment because the present divisions in our society were then being formed. There is yet another indelible image from that year for which few can summon any nostalgia for: The thousands who lined the railroad tracks to bid goodbye to Robert Kennedy. None of the successors to either man were able to overcome the deep divide that has unsettled the national dialogue ever since. The recent campaign attests to the fact the wounds of that time still cause grief for us today. The late ‘60s were a time when conservatives say our country went off course. It is noteworthy that it is also the very same time when liberals lost their power and their appeal. No one who remembers that time and what came after cannot help but think, upon reflection, that we buried more than just Sen. Kennedy that day. The rupture of 1968 was of such a force that our country came apart then and we haven’t been together since. Only by healing this breach can we find a way forward.

What has arisen since are two image-based parties which reinforce the ideological divide even as they put into practice policies both liberals and conservatives oppose. Liberal vs. conservative may produce good theatre, riveting crossfire and great image-making, but is it good politics when it sidesteps major issues that cannot be cleanly divided between them? After all, this is but a two-dimensional view of a three-dimensional world. Because of a long series of mis-alignments, the two parties now stand for such narrow ideologies that politics has been allowed to be simplified down to image and sound-byte. Because they focus on issues not politically resolvable, they end up offering only a choice between competing versions of Globalism. It is in this venue where we have lost both our common culture and our tolerance for dissent. It is in this venue where change must occur. We will do our best to bring that change about, but if these two parties remain unamenable to any alteration in their platforms, in their make-up and in their procedures, there may eventually have to be resort to the third option, but in a manner most unlike previous failed attempts. But that is for another day.

Right now, today, we must engage this debate and spearhead these changes. The proposal seeks to use the engine of political transformation in modern America, the issue advocacy group and the various related efforts ancillary to it. This entity, which I have called the Sensus Foundation, can pave the way for a lasting political alliance because, in the interim, the remit of this non-profit can be limited so as to concentrate on those areas where there is present concurrence, while the rekindling of Nationalism and the re-emergence of the idea of a national economy and a national society will itself help in time to heal the cultural divisions that offer the alliance its greatest challenge. Once we reconnect to each other, the cultural divide will gradually recede and we can become once again one nation. To accomplish this America needs a new ideology and, eventually, a new political party – not a third party but a second party, and that is something it does not now have. A sizeable majority of Americans can come together to say to our government, no matter which wing of the Globalist party holds power, the exact same thing the Dutch people and the French people said to their governments when they rejected the proposed constitution of the European Union: Do not ever surrender our freedom! Globalists are dead wrong when they characterize this as a negative reaction to change. Rather, these people positively voted their desire to continue to govern themselves.

Over the past seven years, I have meticulously researched these issues, monitored new developments, sought support as well as input, all the while constantly honing the message. The long process of bringing this proposal into a stage where it is ready to be presented is now coming to an end. It does so at a time when its merits may well have become apparent to both of your political mentors. Mr. Nader has stated that he believes a new alliance between left and right is in our future.¹ Mr. Buchanan’s latest book clearly distinguishes the conservatives from the Neo-conservatives. Mr. Nader received support from conservatives who decry the open border policies of both parties. Mr. Buchanan has also been the recipient of praise from the supporters of Mr. Nader.² Those animated by the present political divisions may not understand it, but at the end of the day, identity trumps ideology every time.

Even to its detractors who will remain unpersuaded, and there will be many, this is an argument whose presence in the great debate that is politics can only serve to benefit the American people. To its supporters, and there will be many, this is a blueprint for the struggles that lie ahead. But the continuation of this effort requires both financial and political support. I have done all I can to move this project along, but, at this stage, I am not the best person to continue this endeavor alone. I therefore offer this great opportunity to both of you, if you are willing to take this step. I trust that together, you and the organizations you lead and the people who support them, can indeed come together and pioneer a new politics that will garner the support of the majority of the American people and restore our nation. The mandarins at the State Department may wake from their slumber, and the chattering classes may need to take a holiday, but the American people, on both sides of the new divide, will know they are no longer forgotten, and that a nation has been reconstituted and a great issue joined. To that salutary end, I offer any further assistance I can give.

PREFACE

This book began life in the spring of 1999 as a pamphlet entitled Common Sense for the Twenty-First Century. Patterned after Tom Paine’s Common Sense (1776), in essence, it was a response to the Globalism espoused by Bill Clinton. The pamphlet also doubled as a prospectus for a non-profit entity that would be called the Sensus Foundation. This entity was envisioned as an issue advocacy group/think tank dedicated to uniting Anti-Globalists from both the left and the right under a common banner of a rekindled Nationalism. Completed in August of 2001, its three chapters examined American problems, American politics and American prospects. Not for the first time far reaching events would soon overtake its very limited and concise scope. Because the text was widely praised from partisans on both sides of the current political divide, and because it also eerily foreshadowed the September Eleventh attacks, it was not revised to take them into account. Instead, a single eleven by seventeen inch folio was inserted into the binding, bracketing he pages at both the beginning and end. Only a brief Post-Script and an even shorter introduction served to book-end the material and bring it up to date. It was thought that the impact of the original text coupled with the actual events were powerful enough as they were. Although the pamphlet was very well received by those who read it, it never fulfilled its purpose in garnering the funding and support needed to start up the foundation. Constituting Part I of the present book, the text of that pamphlet survives unredacted, except in a few minor details,³ the formatting changes made necessary by updated hardware and software, and some minor stylistic modifications.⁴

Though the principles previously espoused continued to be underscored by subsequent events, these events also continued to preoccupy much of our attention and, therefore, they required a more detailed response. During the march to War with Iraq in the fall of 2002, a short essay entitled "Quo Vadis, America was composed to succinctly state the Nationalist position on Pre-emption. Written as the war drums were sounding for the invasion of Iraq, it posed disturbing questions about the direction we were headed in as it recalled previous consequences of making the wrong choices. As the war itself progressed, many new issues came to the forefront. Once the War with Iraq was underway, a rebuttal to Globalism in the age of Bill Clinton proved quite insufficient as a rebuttal to a very different form of Globalism in the age of George W. Bush. To keep abreast of these changes and to further bolster the argument for the New Nationalism and the foundation which would advance its positions, a series of short essays were written beginning in early 2003 to update and further flesh out the arguments presented in Common Sense for the Twenty-First Century. By the beginning of 2004, these additions amounted to little more than forty pages. For a while, these materials made up a second pamphlet entitled End Notes: Revisions and Extensions of Remarks." It was felt at the time that the cause would best be served by a series of papers responding to events as they took place. Leaving them in their original state in the time period in which they were composed most clearly demonstrated the progress of the argument as it was set against the epochal sequence of events to which they related--a sequence long enough that a template was created which could be applied to whatever happened next. No other rendering was thought to more clearly outline the significance of its challenge, the validity of its premise and the strength of its appeal. Even as the short essays grew in detail and in length, that approach was maintained.

At some point in 2004, the realization dawned that what had been crafted over the preceding five years was not merely a different take on a few basic issues, along with a strategy to make the case for the winning of the arguments, but an entirely new political philosophy itself. Such an ambitious undertaking certainly needed much more than just two pamphlets. Disappointed that the prospectus alone failed to attract the financial support hoped for, the author decided to plough more fertile ground with an alternative approach for advancing these goals. Plans for the issue advocacy group would have to be put on the backburner until such time that the public digestion of its merits was sufficient to make the case for the missing donors and supporters. Though the Sensus Foundation remained and still remains the intermediate means to craft a new politics, other preliminary steps were required before the foundation could be attempted. The Sensus Foundation is, therefore, far from what Alfred Hitchcock once liked to call a McGuffin, a mere plot device whose resolution never formed an essential part of the story.⁵

Because many issues and assertions were treated too cursorily, either because of the space limitations inherent in the writing of a pamphlet, even in the context of a well detailed business proposal, or because of the subsequent occurrences themselves, an entire book, accessible to the general public, would be required to fully explain its principles in a historical context, to make its arguments both forceful and complete, to provide some needed perspective, given the onslaught of the seemingly ever-advancing Globalism, the whirl of the twenty-four hour news cycle and the short-term horizon of too many who comprehend only its sound-bytes, and to otherwise form a basic tome whose impact could potentially last long enough to jump-start a new political movement. As the original portion drew on the works of Tom Paine for its inspiration and support, the new material would draw upon the writings of Adam Smith, a contemporary of Paine’s, and another great figure in history whose own passions also served the cause of American Independence at the time of our nation’s founding. That the former’s quotations would appear on the left side of the page and the latter’s on the right was less a characterization of their views than an attempt to balance more than just the symmetry of the page.⁶

Once more, the original text from 2001 and 2002 would be retained unchanged in the book. Only the additional material crafted since 2003 would be open to rewriting and polishing -- again and again and again. First drafts were seldom ever sufficient. Throughout the two succeeding years, the new text was not only conscientiously edited and re-edited (going through well over a hundred completely new drafts), but continually enlarged by more and longer essays. By the beginning of 2006, the first edition of this book, now titled The New Nationalism, had arrived to a very small test market. By then, the mini-essays covered over a hundred separate topics.

It became clear almost immediately that what may have worked at forty pages did not work at all when that section’s pages numbered almost two hundred. The format had been completely outgrown. A much more reader-friendly approach was needed, such as the traditional division of a book into chapters sounding common themes. It would take a year to rewrite the eighty per-cent of the book which represented all of the material that had been added since the beginning of 2003. The chronological rendering was finally dropped, with only the original text of the 2001 pamphlet retained. To its three chapters were added three short chapters: The original Post-Script from 2001; the original short essay "Quo Vadis, America from 2002; and a more recently composed piece entitled Editorial Notes" needed to further explain, and in some cases correct, the original language that had survived all those years without a rewrite.⁷ In the process of writing the present book, all of the arguments were fully expounded upon even more, making this second edition a full one-third longer than it had been in the first. Hopefully, it is a much more reader-friendly version as well.

Evolving from a part pamphlet/part prospectus to a partial political platform and a series of position papers to a full book and a complete political philosophy was a process that played out over eight years in all, sufficient time in which to complete an undertaking with goals as ambitious as this one. Nevertheless, only for a while can the text finally catch up with events, for books need to have an ending even if our trajectory in history does not. Accordingly, this book takes its leave in the year 2007, but it could have done so at any point in our recent past or in our immediate future, for the story recounted is one of great powers at work, great issues in play, and the balance between them whose exposition will always be played out in the future. Regardless of whatever happens next, the historic forces of empire and independence and the titanic struggles to be both free and secure engaged in by people and by nations everywhere never fully disappear from the forefront of the long march of time.

Part I: Charges against the State

(Declaration)

On this fourth day of November in the year of our Lord two thousand and seven, in the two hundred and thirty-second year of our Republic, one year before we will elect a new government, we, the People of the United States, prefer the following Charges against the two governments of the United States previously elected in the Post-Cold War Era:

Whether by accident or by design, these two governments did engineer the decline and fall of the United States as an economic and military power, as a prosperous country, and as a free and independent nation, through their adoption of foreign, trade, border and budgetary policies so injurious to the health and well-being of the People of the United States that they did constitute malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance in office. The engines of correction – our politics, our journalism, our culture – which had never before failed us even in our darkest days, did stall out once they came under the control of a certain generation of Americans who did aid and abet this decline and fall, and who, therefore, for want of jurisdiction, must be named unindicted co-conspirators.

Charge First

The Post-Cold War governments of the United States did act to undermine our historic foreign policy, to wit, our role as the last defender of freedom and the first foe of empire, and, in lieu thereof, they did instead substitute an imperial foreign policy that does alternate between the erection of a tyrannical global government and the building of our own American Empire. In all this, they did exchange the prestige and the power accorded this country for the fear and the resentment previously accorded our enemies. In all this, the Post-Cold War governments of the United States did countenance not honor and allegiance to our democratic values and republican traditions, but instead the subornation of widespread treason and the outright betrayal of every ideal upon which this nation was founded, to the great prejudice of law and justice, and to the manifest injury of the People of the United States. And each time they did thus, they did take from us our freedom and our liberty.

Charge Second

The Post-Cold War governments of the United States did act to pervert the process of international trade, to wit, the exchange of goods and services to the mutual benefit of the trading nations, and in lieu thereof, they did instead substitute the removal of our wealth and the removal of our ability to create wealth, and they did pass off as progress the substandard jobs, inferior products and mountains of debt they did leave behind. In all this, they did sacrifice our ability to set our own economic policies, and they did yield up our precious right of self-government, when they granted to legal fictions the sovereignty that has always resided with the People ever since our nation was founded. In all this, the Post-Cold War governments of the United States did countenance not trade, but plunder and rape, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice, and to the manifest injury of the People of the United States. And each time they did thus, they did take from us our freedom and our liberty.

Charge Third

The Post-Cold War governments of the United States did act to subvert the process of immigration, to wit, the formal application of foreign nationals for permission to enter our land, and in lieu thereof, they did instead neglect the defense of our frontiers, and they did fail to halt the illegal entrance and further sustenance of tens of millions of foreign nationals from an adjoining state with neither application nor permission. In all this, they did suffer such over-population that they did explode the cost of land; they did sunder the value of labor; they did crush economic mobility as never before; and they did, for the first time ever, cloud our claim to our own territory. In all this, the Post-Cold War governments did countenance not immigration, but invasion and conquest, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice, and to the manifest injury of the People of the United States. And each time they did thus, they did take from us our freedom and our liberty.

Charge Fourth

The Post-Cold War governments of the United States did act to imperil our system of sound finance and fiscal restraint, to wit, the levying of sufficient revenue to carry on the basic functions of government, and the avoidance of onerous and costly commitments at home and abroad, and in lieu thereof, they did instead diminish the sources from which revenue is drawn; they did expand the uses to which revenue is devoted; and they did incur a staggering debt owed to foreign interests, who thereby did gain unwarranted power over us. In all this, they did oversee an ephemeral economy, built not on saving and investment, but on buying and borrowing, financed by speculative debt, secured only by pitch and by puffery. In all this, the Post-Cold War governments did countenance not thrift and prudence, but theft and waste, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice, and to the manifest injury of the People of the United States. And each time they did thus, they did take from us our freedom and our liberty.

In all this, the Post-Cold War governments of the United States did repudiate our rights, did squander our wealth, did undermine our defenses, and did quitclaim our land, contrary to the trust reposed in them by the People of the United States. In all this, the Post-Cold War governments of the United States did act in a manner subversive of constitutional government. And in all this, the Post-Cold War governments of the United States did act in willful and wanton violation of their standing order to preserve, protect and defend the People of the United States.

This prospectus went to the printer in August 2001. As events subsequent to that time have only served to underscore the various points emphasized herein, no substantive revision to the basic text related thereto, other than the appendage of a brief postscript, is thought to be necessary. H.F. -- 15 October 2001

Since the publication of the first edition of this pamphlet, or rather, on the same day on which it came out, the King’s Speech made its appearance in this city. Had the spirit of prophecy directed the birth of this production, it could not have brought it forth at a more seasonable juncture, or a more necessary time. The bloody mindedness of the one, shew the necessity of pursuing the doctrine of the other. Thomas Paine,Common Sense (1776)

The Society to Ensure the National Sovereignty of the United States

The Sensus Foundation presents

Common Sense

For the

Twenty-First Century

Dates of Composition

Chapters One-Three: May 1999 – August 2001

Chapter Four: October 2001

Chapter Five: November 2002

Chapter Six: May 2007

Chapter One: The Threat to America

AS WE ENTER a new millennium, we stand poised to discard the crowning achievement of the last thousand years -- the modern Nation-State. The only known entity that is capable of preserving Freedom and opportunity for the individual, justice for the masses, a healthy environment, a stable society and a vibrant economy is falling victim to the seemingly invincible juggernaut of Globalism. The five cardinal prerogatives of a free people are all being surrendered with little debate and even less thought. The rights of a sovereign people to formulate their own independent foreign policy, to raise and command a national army, to admit or exclude aliens, to levy tariffs on goods of foreign manufacture, and to coin their own money are under attack all over the world through such peculiar pretenders to legitimacy as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the European Union (E.U.).⁸ W e no longer can even remember what makes a group of people into a nation: A common culture, a common heritage, a common language, shared goals, shared sacrifice, shared progress.

Nothing is criminal, there is no such thing as treason; wherefore, every one thinks himself at liberty to act as he pleases. Thomas Paine, Common Sense , Common Sense

Almost every aspect of today's society works against the national interest. Global competition means all the old rules, responsibilities and loyalties are tossed overboard. Suddenly, it is every man for himself. There is no community. There is no country. There is no responsibility. There is no memory of yesterday, nor thought of tomorrow. There is only the here and the now -- twenty-four hour news, twenty-four hour securities trading, twenty-four hour banking, twenty-four hour shopping... Unhappily, the sun never sets on the global economy.

What was first submitted to as a convenience, was afterwards claimed as a right. Ibid.

This New World Order has been unwillingly fostered upon us for a variety of reasons. Chief among them is a mind-set left over from the Cold War when America temporarily put aside her own interests in order to save the world from Communist domination. In order to wage that war, interventionism and Internationalism were necessarily employed on behalf of the free world. The final and decisive battle in that war came in the 1980’s, but it came at a huge cost of record budget deficits largely financed from abroad. The resources our government had to meet our basic needs were brought to heel under the lash of fiscal irresponsibility. With the world awash in (Euro) dollars from the greenback’s long tenure as the preferred international reserve currency, the Bretton Woods system of pegged (fixed) exchange rates governing the Post-War international order was already teetering by the early ‘70s under the weight of America’s growing trade imbalances and rampant inflation. By the time the deficits of the early ‘80s arrived, that system had been fundamentally altered to permit, for the very first time, the free flow of capital. The door was then open to the new doctrine of Globalism. Newly triumphant conservatives, hell-bent on removing the yoke of big government, understandably took advantage of the opportunity to restore the primacy of the individual. But that restoration was flawed and incomplete. In the push to deregulate and remove government as a participant in the economy, they also left out any of the responsibility an individual has to his fellow citizens, to his community, to his country, without which only anarchy and injustice reign. In their indiscriminate attack on the modern welfare state, essential, age-old attributes of nationhood were also under siege. A free market über alles means a society which obliterates rather than reforms its regulatory and social welfare systems; A society where debt and risk lose their sting; A society where the security of millions is tossed to the wind -- a society which is literally deconstructed before our very eyes.

It is as great a folly to pay a Bunker-hill price for law as for land. Ibid.

During this same process a second unprecedented phenomenon was born -- our legal fictions, first as multi-nationals (corporations with many home bases), then as transnationals (corporations with no home base), suddenly became international personages, owing no allegiance to any Nation-State, turning Mercantilism on its head, the commercial benefits going not to the home country, but to the stateless company. No cowering supplicants they, today’s corporate titans hold audiences where rival delegations of elected officials from around the world beg and plead for their favor, where once their very existence depended upon the pleasure of a single sovereign. In a world turned upside down, internationalised companies now export jobs instead of products. Their ability to relocate at will, to become wealthy expatriates and yet still be classified as American business, when everything they have done is in complete and utter disregard of the nation which created them, has produced a two-tiered society, with a few very wealthy and the many who are poor. The moment we focused solely on micro-economic winners and losers, it was inevitable that we would place the interests of companies ahead of the interests of our country. It was inevitable that our own government would let us down when the voice of a once-powerful constituency (domestic business) fell silent. Despite these unfortunate developments, there remains one immutable principle, however, from which no one can dissent. And that is this: Our ability to determine how we live, what benefits the members of our society derive, how we order our mode of life -- whether it be the interventionist, centralised, New Deal government of Franklin Roosevelt or the laissez-faire, hands off, limited government of Ronald Reagan, should be our choice to make. The option of lower taxes and lower services is a decision for the people who pay the bills and receive the benefits. It should not be a choice forced upon them because of world market forces and global social conditions in far away places with strange sounding names. These decisions, when made by a free people, create and entrench cultural, economic and social values not comparable to other societies, each of which is a separate whole. These decisions also indirectly subsidise many different costs, making a truly level international playing field the stuff that dreams are made of.

Ye are opening a door to eternal tyranny, by keeping vacant the seat of government. Ibid.

Under the rules of the global economy we compete by cutting American jobs, by lowering American industrial wages, by decimating American farm prices. Multi-national corporations seeking world markets and undermining National Sovereignty here and abroad, exploiting poorer nations, disemboweling developed ones, have become the new imperialists even as they are but stalking horses for global government. With no tariffs to adjust the playing field, investment capital, when left to flow freely, naturally goes (or threatens to go) where costs are lowest, dragging down living standards every where along the way, as the countries of the world compete in a race to the bottom to see who can offer the lowest wages, the least amount of environmental protection, the greatest tax abatements, the largest population growth, the weakest labor rights -- for those still looking for Ross Perot’s giant sucking sound, look no further.⁹ Because sound money is required to maintain this global economic system, inflation is curbed (unfortunately for many, at a time when borrowing mushroomed), but at a far greater cost than anything since medicine gave up on bloodletting. While espousing greater choice for consumers, we conveniently forget what Henry Ford once instinctively knew well: Consumers must also be producers, lest those who consume the cheap imports today earn the slave labor wages tomorrow. We seem not to realise that what we save now we will pay dearly for later. In the rush of events, basic questions remain unanswered. Have we strayed so far from Common Sense that we simultaneously let countries specialise while companies diversify? Do exports really have such a value they outweigh domestic tranquillity? Shouldn’t we first put our own house in order before fixing the rest of the world? Why should our firms compete with others who don’t even play in the same league? How can the people fend for themselves without the bare essentials of a state? Government may retire from involvement in the market, but can it leave unmanned the external barriers to that market without writing its people’s obituary?

There are ten times more to dread from a patched up connection than from independence. Ibid.

The economic theory of Comparative Advantage (nations should devote their resources to only that which they can produce most efficiently and become dependent on others for everything else) is at the root of this fundamentally misguided adventure. It views all people as economic units of one interdependent whole, rather than as citizens of independent nations. While this is undoubtedly true where one country has a distinct (or absolute) advantage (Russian caviar, Swiss chocolate, Chinese silk, c.), it is totally ruinous as to items which are capable of being replicated anywhere -- the one and only salient attribute of the much celebrated virtual company, a presence so transient its moorings cannot even withstand the first tide. But in fairness to the theory’s original adherents, no one of whom could ever have imagined today's brave new world of wire transfers, portable factories and national cowardice, these results could not have been intended by those who sought to maximise the wealth of nations. Instead of resignation and submission, technology and innovation demand new and redoubled efforts if the Nation-State is to survive as we know it.

Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others the most improper to defend us. Ibid.

But what do nations matter when they are but obstacles to global commerce? So we weaken them, Balkanise them, and then trumpet these stressful, unsatisfying, declining standards of living through the media as inevitable and as positive. Those who extol this new economy cite the huge gains in the Dow during the 1990’s as evidence of economic health. Despite the growing economic indicators touted as loudly as the phantom body counts were in the Vietnam era, this economy is one good for investors alone and not for the majority of us who must work for a living. And this is truly a schizoid economy. One part is in depression: Huge debts (government, business, consumer, margin), unprecedented numbers of bankruptcy filings, ever increasing C.E.O. pay (without even considering the bonanza of stock options¹⁰) while wages stagnate but working hours increase,¹¹ voracious downsizing renewed with every new merger and spin-off, continuing record trade deficits, now approaching an incredible four hundred and fifty billion dollars a year; While the other part prospers, not in spite of, but because of the deflation in wages. When a company’s stock price rises with every new round of layoffs, Wall Street and Main Street are no longer on the same team. Our economy now grows only by cannibalising itself! When wages stagnate while productivity rises, the laws of economics are rendered useless, and the people starve in a booming economy.

Oppression is often the consequence, but seldom or never the means of riches. Ibid.

Nor did the Dow’s performance register gains for America. The advancing numbers were the result of the hefty earnings of those public companies who sold out their country for low wage labor abroad or at home, by falsely claiming labor shortages enabling them to import foreign workers on the cheap.¹² The record breaking bull market also reflected its new and temporary status as the favorite repository of capricious foreign capital fleeing the Asian meltdown, where similar booms preceded collapse. Add to this combustible mix the rampant speculation better explained by psychologists than economists and the market soars regardless of the state of our economy as our investments are no longer connected to our well being. This is an economy where the only thing we now manufacture is illusion; where prosperity has a hollow ring and a false front. This is an economy where professions such as law and medicine and even pursuits such as sports and education are turned into businesses, but also where mom and pop proprietorships have gone the way of the dinosaur; Where downsized wages and the rescinded benefits of part-time or temporary employment apply to all but those at the top; Where the only difference between today’s contingent labor force and the itinerant farm laborer of yore is the zoning designation of the workplace. This is an economy where hard assets explode astronomically in value while human capital has become almost worthless. This is an economy which more properly belongs to a banana republic, one without a middle class, and with all the social and political instability that that entails. This is an economy where life has become such a crapshoot even government coffers depend upon income from gambling. This is an economy where we still can wonder whether man will ever be overtaken by the machines he creates, even though, more and more, we are but cogs in the wheel of behemoth-sized institutions whose sheer power eclipses their very purpose. Nor do any of the other indicators pass muster. Our budget may finally be in balance, but fickle financiers, tax-cutting mania and an unresolved entitlement train wreck are likely to make this only a temporary respite. Be not fooled by record low unemployment¹³ either, for the Soviet Union had that; Nor by statistical aggregates reflecting not the talisman of economic growth, but only unsustainable consumption, a burgeoning population and the outsized fortunes of a few, deflecting attention away from increasingly poor medians, for America, in the words of Will Rogers, was the only place one could go to the poorhouse in an automobile.

The right of all future generations is taken away, by the act of the first electors… hath no parallel… but the doctrine of original sin. Ibid.

Under the rules of the global economy we must let our own country go undefended while we alienate and antagonise people around the world. The events in Kosovo were yet another advance for Globalism at the expense of National Sovereignty. Interference in the perennial wars of a land where none of the various inhabitants ever had a monopoly on butchery was justified by its supporters as permissible under a new pooling of National Sovereignty.¹⁴ Were there really strategic reasons or humanitarian grounds to intervene, or was NATO, historically and legally only a defensive alliance, pressed into service to make the Balkans safe for multi-national corporations to further plunder their benefactors, as well as avoid another Michael New (the private who was court-martialed for refusing to don U.N. insignia)? Are these transnational companies so hungry for new markets that even a blood-strewn battlefield looks like a prime investment opportunity? To further these ends, our soldiers are rechristened peace-keepers, but they are too often stationed in theatres where there is no peace to keep. What irony: Feeble attempts at nation-building by those who only know how to do the opposite! The instrument of this particular farce, NATO, instead of being disbanded as it should have been when its mission was accomplished in 1989, was instead expanded into Eastern Europe, stoking the fires of Russian Nationalism and insecurity, committing ourselves to defend a region not formerly within our sphere of influence, risking a rekindled Cold War. Now that peace in our time has once again been proclaimed, how can the Albanian refugees be safe if Serbian Sovereignty is retained over Kosovo? How can Serbia exercise her sovereign rights when a foreign protectorate actually governs? They won't redraw the borders and partition Kosovo because they don't believe in borders. They don't believe in nations. They don't believe in Independence. They don't believe in Freedom. They would intervene in the conflict not to take sides or safeguard humanitarian interests, but to deny both belligerents their lawful status in order to impose upon them an unnatural order.

Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Ibid.

In what was once the Third World, legions of peasants are lured out of the country-side, abandoning their traditional cultures and the subsistence agriculture which had sustained them from time immemorial. But they find only destitution and squalor in the global sweatshops situated in newly urban areas now littered with McDonaldses and Banks of America. Like us, their right to determine their own future is taken from them in the relentless and inexorable march that is the global economy, where standards and goals are based solely on western measurements of advancement. It is their consumption¹⁵ Trade Representatives Carla Hills, Mickey Kantor and Ron Brown continually claimed would provide the demand for increased U.S. exports -- the only carrot ever dangled amid the many sticks of Globalism! The dearth of logic here on the part of our leaders is so staggering, amazement quickly turns to dread. Are they so naïve they cannot see that the global economy they are so enamored of is geared to do only one thing -- feed America’s appetite for over-consumption¹⁶ with the entirety of Third World production, the anvil on which the multi-nationals pound down American living standards? Factor out the major role played by speculation, and any growth remaining in the United States is now consumption-driven, just as it is export-driven in the developing world (a designation which is, therefore, a misnomer). In both places it is financed by foreign debt. The global economy produces not wealth but red ink. It sinks almost everyone with an over-capacity of production and a huge and rising surplus of labor. Worse, if this gigantic albatross did work the way it was intended, the world would face an (even more acute) environmental mess instead of an economic one.

We are not insulting the world with our fleets and armies, nor ravaging the globe for plunder. Ibid.

We have imposed our will all over the map except within our own borders. So long as America thinks of herself in archaic terms, as the sole remaining superpower or as the leader of the free world, there is no impediment to running roughshod over every other nation and culture deserving treatment not as vassals but as peers. Once again, the Ugly American is a player on the world stage. The United States, burdened with so many internal fault-lines, should stand down from the pinnacle of First Among Equals it had to unwillingly assume because of necessity and circumstance, and, though return to once again become one of a half-dozen Great Powers, like Cincinnatus, never allow another to take her former privileged place. After all, from Lend-Lease in 1940 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was that same necessity and circumstance which comported with, rather than constituted an exception to, that venerable maxim that no one nation should ever be allowed to attain global hegemony -- ourselves included. We have for far too long (paid every) price and (borne every) burden and can no longer afford to continue doing so. In military terms, this transition is more fortification than stand down. This modest proposal may prove difficult, for we now fail to meet even the traditional definitions of what constitutes a state. A defined territory? Not with our undefended border. A defined population? Not when people and businesses can come and go as they please. A capacity to enter into foreign affairs? Not when unilateralism is a word which brings endless reproach.† A steady, stable government? Not when it consistently declines to exercise its authority.

That he may accomplish by craft and subtlety, in the long run, what he cannot do by force and violence in the short run. Ibid.

Other affronts to National Sovereignty, such as indictments against sitting and former heads of state¹⁷ by courts with neither the interest in nor the jurisdiction over the accused,¹⁸ a proposed International Criminal Court, empowered to try not nations (as is the World Court), but their individual citizens, and the so far still-born Multi-Lateral Agreement on Investment (M.A.I.), which subjects all state and local law to foreign objection (so much for Federalism), threaten to join together the two historically separate realms of international and domestic law. To accomplish by stealth and by finance, what every conqueror in history failed to do by military force does nothing to mitigate the crime. The bloodshed averted still leaves people the world over in shackles and in poverty, without the Freedom and the Independence that in the end are the only things that matter. If governments will leave our economic well-being to the wiles of the global marketplace, they will inevitably leave the protection of our democratic liberties to those same forces as well. This very same choice has already been made by us (albeit not for ourselves) every year Most Favorite Nation¹⁹ (M.F.N.) status was renewed for China.

To unite the sinews of commerce and defence is sound policy; for when our strength and our riches play into each other’s hand, we need fear no external enemy. Ibid.

Under the rules of the global economy we sell out our own security in order to build up our potential enemies. Not too long ago we sheltered our economic competitors under the umbrella of America's defence. We no longer need our government's largess to forego our own interests, for our own people are now doing it to themselves. Eisenhower's Military/Industrial Complex had nothing on these Quisling corporations who shamelessly use their new riches to not only lobby against reversing this disastrous course, but to convince us how wonderful everything is when open markets are pursued. Not content to rely on the usual channels of diplomacy, this dominion of special interests permits foreign states and their corporate clients to exercise our rights to petition our government, rights that only our own citizens should possess. As mid-wife in the birth of much domestic legislation and many international agreements,²⁰ these representatives of global business deal only in secret covenants and sleight of hand. They hope we won't notice that the growing trade deficits, means Americans instead of securing their own future, are financing the next economic and military threat to that future. One example lies at the other end of what used to be the Pacific Ocean, but is now known in the global economy as the pacific rim. Between the trade deficits underwriting the Chinese military, the deindustrialisation of our future ability to respond, and unfettered global trade, China hardly needed to resort to espionage to obtain our nuclear secrets. They were not only available for free, they came with the financing to put them to use! Though China has not possessed imperial designs since the days of the Golden Horde, the ever-churning cross-currents of the global economy may yet entice her to return to expansionist pursuits

Security being the true design and end of government. Ibid.

As the globalists claim, open markets do undermine state control -- as has occurred in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union, and perhaps tomorrow in China (although authoritarian Capitalism is not an impossible alternative -- witness the city-state of Singapore). But open markets have also undermined state control in the western democracies, especially right here at home, where the abundance of evidence surrounds us. With the U.S. up for sale, infusions of foreign investment swap short-term growth for future Economic Sovereignty. Far from a theoretical point, foreign investment will undoubtedly prove even less faithful to us than they are to their own. Already the signs of a third-rate power appear in the form of continuing trade deficits, sizable profit repatriations, and a growing foreign dependency. In fact, we begin to resemble the troubled developing nations who are also counseled to be more competitive in an economy similarly marked by decreasing wages and increasing debt, as the system is designed to increase both our imports (because of lost production) and their exports (because of restricted consumption). And why are we without the power to reverse this disturbing trend? Because, the United States (along with much of the rest of the world) ceded its ability to defend its own interests, when our Trade Representative signed the GATT treaty which created the World Trade Organisation (W.T.O.). In its decisions thus far, all rendered in private, the W.T.O. has struck down not only every national regulation that refuses to aid exploitation abroad, but also those that protect its own people, its own industries, its own resources. Not only are hard-won social benefits, national economic advantages, and the efforts