TRANSATLANTIC Two-Step - The New American Magazine - 5-12-08.pdf

Is Making Taxes “Fair” the Answer? • Expelled : Movie Review • The Story of the Pueblo

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May 12, 2008

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2008 Climate DebateDespite claims that there is a scientific consensus about human-caused global warming, a convention in New York brought together over 100 of the world’s top scientists who dispute global-warming dogma. Get the full story in this issue. (March 31, 2008, 48pp) TNA080331

Reining In SpendingThe U.S. economy is faltering fast, but is it doomed? Not if we act decisively and soon. Read this issue of The New AmericAN to get the prescription for our ailing economy. (February 4, 2008, 48pp)TNA080204

Freedom’s CallThis issue tells why a return to constitutional principles is only part of the solution to safeguard our rights and our way of life. A recommitment to traditional morality, family- centered ideals, and sound money is also needed to preserve liberty and prosperity. (April 14, 2008, 48pp) TNA080414

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Transatlantic Two-StepOne year ago President George W. Bush met with European Union leaders to discuss “integrating” the U.S. and EU economies. Today advisory boards are promoting faster integration of our laws, regulations, and policies. Does this spell trouble? Find out in this issue. (May 12, 2008, 48pp) TNA080512

Vol. 24, No. 10 May 12, 2008

Cover Story

REGIONALISM

12 Transatlantic Two-Stepby Dennis Behreandt — A long-term effort seeking the transatlantic integration of America with the European Union is now underway.

19 Partners Across the Pondby John F. McManus — Why are the United States and the EU “integrating” under the table?

COVER Newscom

FeatureS

INTERVIEW

21 A Climate of RepressionInterview by William F. Jasper — Living under communism, Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, saw how repressive political mechanisms can stifle opposition and control society. He sees the same pattern being repeated in today’s global-warming debate.

TAXES

25 Is Making Taxes “Fair” the Answer?by Laurence M. Vance — The FairTax legislation would change the method used to collect taxes without changing the amount.

MOVIE REVIEW

30 Allow Intelligenceby James Perloff — Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed makes an intelligent case for pursuing intelligent design.

HISTORY — PAST AND PERSPECTIVE

35 The Story of the Puebloby W.W. “Chip” Wood — In January 1968, North Korea seized the USS Pueblo. The story of the ship’s brave crew and how their vessel remains a tourist attraction in Pyongyang should not be forgotten.

THE LAST WORD

44 Has Bush Gone Green?by Gary Benoit

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5 Letters to the Editor

7 Inside Track

11 QuickQuotes

33 The Goodness of America

40 Correction, Please!

43 Exercising the Right

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FairTax FallacyAs a FairTax organizer in Oklahoma, I was disappointed in Mr. Rockwell’s article called “The Great Tax Myth” (The New AmericAN, April 14, 2008). While I com-pletely agree that a return to constitutional taxation is conceptually attractive, there isn’t enough support for such a proposal. On the other hand, the FairTax Bill H.R. 25/S. 1025 exists and has 72 cosponsors and at least a million vocal and passionate supporters. The FairTax, since it involves an indirect consumption-based tax, would be in harmony with the original Constitu-tion. If we wait for Mr. Rockwell’s move-ment, we will all be old and gray or dead long before anything changes, and we will be left with this income-tax monster and its 70,000 pages of documentation (and growing) and the most brutal, Mafia-style, rights-destroying collection agency that could possibly exist.

The hidden, embedded cost of the current income-tax system is estimated to be about 22 percent of the cost of everything we buy in this country. When the current tax system is gone, business competition will drive that 22 percent out of the price of goods and then 23 percent will be added back as the Fair-Tax. There should be no significant cost-of-living increase as a result of implementing the FairTax.

All income-based taxes are abolished in the FairTax world, including corporate income taxes. This will make the USA the tax haven of the world. Several years ago Princeton Economics surveyed 500 interna-tional corporations to see what they would do if we pass the FairTax. One hundred said they will bring their corporate head-quarters here and 400 said they would bring their next manufacturing plant here. Why would they be willing to do so if they saw no advantage?

While a federal budget of $3.1 trillion sticks in my craw too, I figure it is more fea-sible politically to sell a revenue-neutral tax system than a system that would seem to rob

the government of revenue. Since the only point to manipulate in the FairTax world will be the rate, after passage, we could begin a campaign to force the government to lower the rate until we are all happy with it.

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More Roe v. Wade HistoryWhen I read the article “Before Roe v. Wade” (January 21 issue), I was disappointed by the history that was told. The author seemed to get most of his information from the histo-rian Mohr, whose influential thesis is at best incomplete. I would recommend the author also read the works by Marvin Olasky.

Olasky traces the history of abortion/in-fanticide from the 17th century. In his writ-ings he shows that:

1) Scientists believed in the 17th and 18th century that life began before conception (the idea of sperm and egg conception emerged only in 1827).

2) In the early to mid 19th century, abor-tion was common only among prostitutes, seduced women, and a portion of the married women (not Protestant women in general). Among married women, those who were in-volved in spiritism were the most likely to obtain abortions.

3) The American Medical Association in the 19th century was a relatively weak orga-nization when compared to today. However, they lobbied against abortion.

4) Churches were relatively quiet in the abortion debates.

5) Age-of-consent laws were raised so it was easier to prosecute older men for tak-ing advantage of girls and young women. In 1894, for example, Delaware’s age of con-sent was seven years old!

6) The difficulty in containing abortion in the early to mid 1800s was due to the fact that there were no corpses, no autopsies, few if any witnesses, second-hand declarations, dying declarations, etc. How was a prose-cutor supposed to convince the jury that a crime had occurred?

7) Ammi Rogers, a Connecticut minister, was convicted under common law for caus-ing an abortion through the use of pernicious drugs prior to the quickening of the unborn child. The landmark Connecticut legislation was in response to this case.

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Publisher John F. McManus

Editor Gary Benoit

Senior Editor William F. Jasper

Associate Editor Kurt Williamsen

Contributors Dennis J. Behreandt

Christopher S. Bentley Steven J. DuBord

Selwyn Duke Jodie Gilmore

Gregory A. Hession, J.D. Ed Hiserodt

William P. Hoar R. Cort Kirkwood

Warren Mass Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Ann Shibler Michael E. Telzrow

Joe Wolverton II, J.D.

Editorial Assistant Denise L. Behreandt

Art Director Joseph W. Kelly

Desktop Publishing Specialist Steven J. DuBord

Research Brian T. Farmer Bonnie M. Gillis Wayne Olson

Marketing Larry Greenley

Public Relations Bill Hahn

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CORRECTION: The article “America’s North Star” in the March 31 issue as-cribes “Seward’s Folly” — the purchase of Alaska from Russia — to the Lincoln administration, but in fact the deal was entirely negotiated and consummated during the Johnson administration.

THE NEW AMERICAN • MAY 12, 2008 5

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Be one of the many dedicated Americansworking together to build a better world. Visit

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As part of the pulse-taking of the electorate to see what makes Americans’ hearts beat faster as the United States heads toward another presidential election, an Associated Press-Yahoo! News poll found that the worsening economy is Americans’ number one concern, yet candidates’ positions on the economy are not creating a base of support for any of the leading presidential can-didates: Clinton, McCain, or Obama.

Such a seeming logical disconnect might actually be very logi-cal. It could be because, as Robert Michaels, a Republican from Fort Collins, Colorado, said, “I’m not sure what any candidate can do to improve the job situation.” Or it could be, especially in the case of lower middle-class and poor Americans, that the voters have already chosen the candidate that they believe will give them the biggest government handout. Or it could be that Americans are realizing that there isn’t much of a substantive

The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 (H.R. 4986), which Congress passed on January 22 and President Bush signed into law on January 28, contained language that ef-fectively repealed revisions to the Posse Comitatus Act made in 2006. The 2006 language made it easier for a president to declare martial law.

A wide range of freedom-loving individuals had opposed the expansion of police powers granted to the federal government as part of the ongoing “war on terror.” In an address before the House of Representatives on May 22, 2007, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) cited “the changes made to the Insurrection Act of 1807 and to Posse Comitatus by the Defense Authorization Act of 2007.” Because of that act, warned Paul, “martial law can be declared not just for ‘insurrection’ but also for ‘natural disasters,

difference amongst the three candidates, especially having to do with the economy, hence they might as well make their deci-sion for president based on some less concrete criteria — such as whether he or she is more honest than the other candidates.

public health reasons, terrorist attacks or incidents’ or for the vague reason called ‘other conditions.’ ”

Section 1074 of the 2008 bill (“Protection of Certain Indi-viduals”), which provided for the military to protect designated Defense Department and military personnel, also strictly lim-ited that role by stating: “Other than the authority to provide protection and security under this section, nothing in this sec-tion may be construed to bestow any additional law enforce-ment or arrest authority upon the qualified members of the Armed Forces and qualified civilian employees of the Depart-ment of Defense.”

A leading opponent in Congress of the 2006 expansion of Posse Comitatus powers, as well as a leading advocate of their repeal, was Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).

Main Concern Doesn’t Sway Voters

Congress Reverses Posse Comitatus Act Changes

The leaders of the United States, Canada, and Mexico met in New Orleans on April 21-22 for the fourth round of annual talks for-merly known as the Security and Prosperity Partnership. However, the session carried the label North American Leaders’ Summit. The likely reason for not calling it a Security and Prosperity Summit has to be widespread opposition to the SPP generated by The New AmericAN, its parent organization the John Birch Society, and like-minded activists. Increasing numbers of Americans — as well as a growing number of opponents in Canada — are rightly concerned that the SPP is actually a major step toward the cre-ation of a North American Union.

On the first day of his visit, Presi-dent Bush spoke very briefly at a

reception hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Introduced by Chamber CEO Thomas J. Donohue, the president said he “strongly supports NAFTA” and was hugely disappointed when the House of Representatives refused only days ago to approve a Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

While introducing the president, Donohue claimed that NAFTA had created more jobs and benefitted trade, adding that it “should never be altered.” Asked later by New Ameri-cAN publisher and JBS President John McManus why he failed to mention “the loss of three million U.S. jobs because of NAFTA,” he snapped, “Anyone who believes that has distorted the figures.” Americans whose jobs were exported south of the border believe it.

SPP Moves Forward Under Different Name


Inside Track

John F. McManus at the north american leaders’ Summit

hillary Clinton

John McCain

barack obama

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The recent precipitous climb in global food prices is nothing less than “mass murder,” according to UN food envoy Jean Ziegler. In a recent interview with an Austrian newspaper, Ziegler, commenting on the climb in commodities prices that have triggered food riots in Haiti and growing lines from Latin America to Africa to Asia of hungry people seeking UN food handouts, suggested that the food shortages are a consequence of globalization. Multinationals, market traders, financial speculators, and other “financial bandits” are responsible for the crisis. “Hunger has not been down to fate for a long time — just as Karl Marx thought.... This is silent mass murder,” he averred, adding, “We have to put a stop to this.”

And that’s the rub. “We,” of course, means UN authorities and kindred globalists, most of whom, like Ziegler, accept Karl Marx’s version of reality. To wit: financial crises, shortages, recessions, and other alleged “failures” of the free market are all consequences of the rapacity of wicked capitalists. Marx’s

solution was to empower the state with absolute control over property and production, a program that has now been adopted to varying degrees by every country in the world, including the United States.

In one thing Ziegler is right: the looming global food shortage is indeed man-made, but the culprits are rather different from what UN officials would have us believe. The dizzying rise of oil prices has been the single most important contributor, driving up prices in supermarkets and commodities exchanges the world over. Oil prices are particularly susceptible to dollar inflation because of the large amount of oil purchased in dollars. When the Federal Reserve opens wide the money spigots, flooding the world with American paper money, the value of the dollar relative to a gallon of oil drops. But it was Karl Marx himself — patron saint of global socialism — who recommended, in The Communist Manifesto, the creation of all-powerful central banks like the Fed.

Global Food Prices on the Rise

On April 20, Pope Benedict XVI, the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics, concluded a six-day visit to the United States, home to 67.5 million of his flock. In between the pope’s April 15 arrival and his farewell ceremony, the pontiff took part in a whirlwind round of ceremonies.

On April 18, the pope addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations. Speaking partly in French and partly in English, Pope Benedict praised the world body despite its militant secular-ism. The pope began by inexplicably lauding the UN’s coercive nature, and he went on to praise the UN’s concept of human rights — both of which are in measure feared and scorned by many religious peoples:

• “The United Nations embodies the aspiration for a ‘greater degree of international ordering’ … inspired and governed by the principle of subsidiarity, and therefore capable of responding to the demands of the human family through binding international rules and through structures capable of harmonizing the day-to-day unfolding of the lives of peoples.”

• “Human dignity, which is the foundation and goal of the re-sponsibility to protect, leads us to the theme we are specifically focusing upon this year, which marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Univer-sal Declaration of Human Rights.”

Contrary to the pope’s favorable comments, the UN doesn’t espouse sacro-sanct rights or protect such rights and human dignity. To it, “rights” are human activities that the UN al-lows people to undertake. The Universal Declaration

of Human Rights proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in 1948 presumes the power to grant rights (unlike the Declaration of Independence, which declares that men are “endowed by their creator” with such rights) and further presumes the power to can-cel them. For example, a revision of the 1948 document, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, states:

Article 1B: 1. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.... 3. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limita-tions as are prescribed by law. [Emphasis added.]

Since it is unlikely that Pope Benedict believes that freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject to limitations as are prescribed by law (as in China), the faithful Catholic who understands the true nature of the United Nations will very likely find some statements made by the pope before the General As-sembly confusing and disturbing.

On his final day in America, the pope visited the Ground Zero site of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and

celebrated mass at Yankee Stadium before 57,000 worshipers. In his homily at that event, Benedict spoke against abortion, affirming “the truths which alone can guarantee respect for the in-alienable dignity and rights of each man, woman and child in our world — in-cluding the most defense-less of all human beings, the unborn child in the mother’s womb.”

Pope Benedict XVI’s Comments Give Pause

Inside Track

8 THE NEW AMERICAN • MAY 12, 2008

pope benedict xvI at the un, with the flag that flew over un headquarters in baghdad when it was bombed in 2003

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A Rand Corporation report indicates that 18.5 percent of current and former U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans recently surveyed reported symptoms of depression or post-traumatic stress disor-der. The survey polled 1,965 members of the armed forces, both those still currently on duty as well as veterans of tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Neoconservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife has had a change of heart concerning Hillary Clinton. Scaife, the partial heir of the Mellon family fortune, once was involved in the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign and helped to fund efforts by the American Spectator magazine in the 1990s to expose Bill Clinton’s womanizing and abuse of power while governor of Ar-kansas. But he has decided to throw his support behind Hillary Clinton after a meeting with her in March. “[That] meeting and her remarks during it changed my mind about her,” Scaife admit-ted in a laudatory editorial entitled “Hillary, Reassessed.”

Just before Pennsylvania’s presidential primaries, Scaife’s newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, published a glowing endorsement of Hillary Clinton. The two-term New York senator is “far more experienced in government [than Obama] — as an engaged first lady to a governor and a president, as a second-term senator in her own right,” the Tribune-Review enthused. “She has a real voting record on key issues. Agree with her or not, you at least know where she stands instead of being forced to wonder.”

While all of this may seem a betrayal of the so-called right wing that Scaife supposedly epitomizes (he has supported such

“There is a major health crisis facing those men and women who have served our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan,” AP quoted Terri Tanielian, a researcher at Rand and the project’s co-leader. “Unless they receive appropriate and effective care for these men-tal health conditions, there will be long-term consequences for them and for the nation.” n

organizations as the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Reason Foundation, Judicial Watch, the Federalist Society, and the American Enterprise Institute, among many others), he has long given generously to certain of the political left’s most influential institutions as well. These include the globalist Center for Strate-gic Policy and International Studies, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Planned Parenthood (Scaife is an ardent sup-porter of abortion).

Richard Mellon Scaife’s track record is all too typical of ultra-rich power brokers who dedicate their assets not to prin-cipled causes but to a power agenda championed across po-litical party lines. Only thus can be explained the transforma-tion of the man the Washington Post once styled the “Funding Father of the Right” into a Hil-lary Clinton supporter.

Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Report Psychological Problems

“Funding Father of the Right” Backs Hillary for President

On April 18, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda told visiting Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi — who is in Japan as an ad-vance man for Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit in May — that the unrest in Tibet has become an international issue. The Beijing government maintains that the ongoing protests and suppression of freedom in Tibet are a domestic matter. In response to ques-tions about rioting and the government crackdown, Yang shifted blame to the Dalai Lama, claiming the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader has failed to engage in dialogue.

On the same day, Tibet’s prime minister-in-exile Samdhong Rinpoche predicted from his enclave of Dharamshala in India that China will extend its suppression of freedom in Tibet and issued an appeal for the international community to intervene. “Tibet is virtually sealed,” said Rinpoche. “In a short period the Chinese authorities will destroy all evidence by executing the innocent Tibetans.”

Riots against government policies in Chinese-occupied Tibet began in March, and exiled Tibetan leaders say more than 150 Tibetans have died in the subsequent Chinese crackdown. However

both Rinpoche and the Dalai Lama have asserted that the violent protesters were actually Chinese agents provocateurs masquerad-ing as Tibetans. “In particular, there are cases where people have seen Chinese policemen in Tibetan dress and in monks’ robes tak-ing the leading role during the protests,” said Rinpoche.

Ongoing Conflict in Tibet

9THE NEW AMERICAN • MAY 12, 2008

Richard Mellon Scaife

Yang Jiechi (left) visiting Yasuo Fukuda in Japan

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Don’t Even Try to Suggest He’s Too Old“Shut up!”When a reporter asked wheelchair-using Senator robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who at 90 years of age is the longest-serving senator in that body’s history, how he responds to anyone who wonders about his capacity to do his job, he received a terse answer.

Martin Luther King’s Niece Strongly Opposes Abortion“There are people dying in this country every day. They are unborn children. The fight against abortion is a new frontier in the civil rights movement.”Speaking on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of her uncle, Dr. alveda King, who regrets hav-ing had two abortions of her own but is now the mother of six, speaks often about the plight of a new category of powerless people. She is currently a senior fellow at the conservative Alexis de Tocqueville Institution in the nation’s capital.

Candidate Thinks Having an Unwanted Baby Is Punishment“I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”Speaking about his own daughters, Barack Obama shocked many with his comment, and National Black Pro-Life Union leader Day Gardner objected strongly to the senator’s remark.

Another Obama Comment Draws Sharp Criticism“It’s not surprising they get bitter, then they cling to guns or reli-gion, or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immi-grant sentiment, or antitrade sentiment, as a way to express their frustrations.”Speaking about white working-class voters, Barack Obama didn’t do himself any favors with his unflattering characterization of a substantial number of the people he wants to vote for him.

NAFTA Was One of Bill Clinton’s “Mistakes” Says His Wife“As smart as my husband is, he does make mistakes.”Referring to NAFTA, Hillary Clinton said she would fix the pact, not terminate U.S. membership in it.

Top U.S. General Sees No End to Iraq War“We haven’t turned any corners. We haven’t seen any lights at the end of the tunnel. The champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator.”Testifying before Congress, Council on Foreign Relations member General david Petraeus gave no indication that this unpopular war would soon end.

Failing Schools Draw Attention“When more than one million students a year drop out of high school, it’s more than a problem. It’s a catastrophe.”Founding Chairman Colin Powell of America’s Promise Alliance commented on his organization’s finding that 17 of our nation’s 50 largest cities have high-school graduation rates below 50 percent.

Leading Internationalists From the Council on Foreign Relations Are McCain’s Policy Advisers“I am a strong supporter of the senator.”It is hardly surprising that top Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member Henry Kissinger would be a leading adviser to Senator John McCain, another CFR member, as the campaign for the White House begins. n

— compiled by JohN F. mcmANuS

THE NEW AMERICAN • MAY 12, 2008

QuickQuotes

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Robert byrd

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President Bush with german Chancellor angela Merkel

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REGIONALISM

A long-term effort seeking the transatlantic integration of America with the European Union is now underway. If it is successful, the effects on our country would be dramatic.

TransaTlanTicTwo-Step

by Dennis Behreandt

A few quick showers moved through the Washington, D.C., area on the morning of April 30,

2007, but they wouldn’t stay long. By the time a smiling Angela Merkel, the Ger-man chancellor, joined President Bush and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso of Portugal in the Rose Garden at the White House, temperatures were beginning to climb on what would become a beautiful, warm spring day in the nation’s capital. The leaders were there for a press conference at which they would announce the results of the recent U.S.-EU Summit. While the flags of the United States, Germany, and the European Union fluttered in the warm breeze behind them, the trio of leaders gazed at the assembled press corps. At 1:18 p.m., President Bush addressed the gathering.

“Thank you all, please be seated,” President Bush began. “Welcome to the Rose Garden. I want to welcome Angela Merkel and Jos Barroso here. Thank you all for your friendship, thank you for what has been a serious set of discussions,” the president said in his characteris-tic drawl.

Without further preface, he then described the outcome of recent U.S.-EU negotiations.

“I told the chancellor and the president that the EU-U.S. rela-tions are very important to our country,” the president contin-ued, “that not only is it important for us to strategize how to pro-mote prosperity and peace, but it’s important for us to achieve concrete results. And we have done so. I thank the chancellor and Jos very much for the trans-Atlantic economic integration plan that the three of us signed today. It is a statement of the importance of trade. It is a com-mitment to eliminating barriers to trade. It is a recognition that the closer that the United States and the EU become, the better off our people become. So this is a substantial agreement and I appreciate it.”

With that, the president an-nounced a wide-ranging agree-

ment that committed the United States of America to a path that would see the na-tion shed its long-cherished independence in favor of integration with the European Union. As described by the White House itself, the U.S.-EU summit:

• “Adopted a framework on transatlantic economic integration which lays a long-term foundation for building a stronger and more integrated transatlantic economy, in particular by fostering cooperation to re-duce regulatory burdens and accelerating work on key ‘lighthouse projects’ in the areas of intellectual property rights, secure trade, investment, financial markets, and innovation.”

• “Adopted a declaration on political and security issues,” including the seemingly mu-tually exclusive goals of com-batting terrorism and working “towards visa-free travel for all EU and U.S. citizens by creating conditions by which the Visa Waiver Program may be expanded.”

• “Adopted a joint statement on energy security and climate

change” that commits the United States to working collectively with the EU to ensure “secure, affordable, and clean supplies of energy and tackling climate change.”

What seems like a revolutionary step toward transatlantic merger was little remarked in the press. The entire event seems to have occurred in a vacuum. There was little or no coverage of pos-sible discussion of transatlantic integra-tion in the years before the summit and, over the past year, there has likewise been little or no coverage of subsequent devel-opments. It seems almost as if the agree-ment hammered out between the White House and the European Union was a

The president announced a wide-ranging agreement that committed the united States of america to a path that would see the nation shed its long-cherished independence in favor of integration with the European union.

New agenda: Efforts to move the United States closer to integration with the European Union began during the Clinton administration.

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freak occurrence, a political accident of nature. Nothing, however, could be fur-ther from the truth.

In fact, quietly and behind the scenes, a very active if unofficial and non-gov-ernmental effort has been underway to grease the skids for transatlantic merger. The effort has been led by a little-known non-governmental organization (NGO) that has been working to advance plans to merge the United States with Europe. Few have heard of the work of this group, the Transatlantic Policy Network (TPN), because it has never been covered by the mainstream media. That is a particularly interesting fact, given that TPN’s support-ers and collaborators include many pow-erful and well-known corporations, think tanks, and legislators on both sides of the

Atlantic. That they are cooperating in an effort to merge the United States and the EU would seem to be at least marginally newsworthy.

Even though the mainstream media can’t be bothered to report on it, the American people might be interested to learn that TPN’s plans are not just talk. Working carefully, if quietly, since the early 1990s, the organization has moved quickly to gain the agreement of leaders on both sides of the ocean that further in-tegration is necessary and desirable. Now, transatlantic integration is much closer to reality than anyone would suspect.

Merger AheadIn February 2007, ahead of the U.S.-EU Summit, TPN published its white paper

entitled Completing the Trans-atlantic Market. In that paper, the organization summarized its goals. The executive sum-mary states:

It is time for a complemen-tary, top down approach to transatlantic cooperation through a joint commitment by the European Union and the United States to a road-map for achieving a Trans-

atlantic Market by 2015 and creation of an overarching framework for dialogue and action to achieve that goal.

The emphasis placed on “top down” is not insignificant. As typically used by NGOs, that terminology usually implies that executive-level leaders will impose their desires on the citizens of a nation, not the other way around as envisioned, for instance, by America’s Founders.

That aside, is the plan as described by the TPN white paper, really anything to worry about? After all, isn’t a common “Transatlantic Market” just a matter of economics and trade policy that will have little or no effect on the sovereignty and independence of nations?

The experience of Europe over the last 60 years demonstrates that the creation of a common market is only a first step toward more thorough integration. The European Union itself started life as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), an intergovernmental organization formed in the aftermath of World War II ostensibly to give a boost to the coal and steel industries in European nations ravaged by war.

But the ECSC was only meant to be a first step to further economic and (eventu-ally) political integration. In 1957, it was

Quietly and behind the scenes, a very active if unofficial and non-governmental effort has been underway to grease the skids for transatlantic merger. The effort has been led by a little-known non-governmental organization called the Transatlantic policy network.

Ongoing effort: While u.S. citizens worried about osama bin laden in 2002, meetings on closer integration of the u.S. and the Eu continued.

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superseded by the European Economic Community (EEC) that was created by the Treaty of Rome. The EEC, which was also known as the Common Market, became the European Community, the immediate predecessor of today’s European Union.

The progression from common market to political union as it occurred in Europe should not be mistaken for a singular and unusual event. It is, in fact, the process through which other international political mergers are expected to occur. The process was explained by University of Nevada professor of economics Glen Atkinson. In a paper published in the Social Science Journal entitled “Regional Integration in the Emerging Global Economy,” Professor Atkinson explained:

The lowest level of integration is a free trade area that involves only the removal of tariffs and quotas among the parties. If a common external tar-iff is added, then a customs union has been created. The next level, or a com-mon market, requires free movement of people and capital as well as goods and services. It is this stage where institutional development becomes critical. The stage of economic union requires a high degree of coordination or even unification of policies. This sets the foundation for political union.

If TPN succeeds in cata-lyzing the existence of a transatlantic common mar-ket by 2015 as planned, that will be only one short step removed from actual political integration.

Integration MilestonesOn its website, TPN proudly lists some of its “achievements” in build-

ing the framework for a common market. “In a short space of time,” the organization says, it has “built a credible ‘network of networks’ linking the political, business and academic communities. It confirmed its value to members by helping to shape key developments in the EU-US partner-ship during the 1990s.”

According to the organization, some of its achievements include:

• Creating the “New Transatlantic Agenda” in December 1995, described by TPN as “a blueprint for joint action by the US and the European Union across all of the most important political, eco-nomic, security and social aspects of their relationship.”

• Launching the “Transatlantic Business Dialogue” also in 1995, “with a specific objective to remove the trade and invest-ment obstacles to the creation of a real transatlantic marketplace.”

• Creating the “Transatlantic Economic Partnership (TEP)” at the London EU-U.S. Summit in May 1998. According to the organization, “TEP identified a series of elements for an initiative to intensify and extend multilateral and bilateral co-operation and common actions in the field of trade and investment, including formal

trade negotiations and trust enhancing measures.”

These efforts have garnered significant transoceanic support, both from political and business leaders. In 2004 and again in 2005, the EU parliament passed resolu-tions “in which the concept of completing the transatlantic market by 2015 is sup-ported.” TPN notes with apparent satis-faction that the U.S. Congress has done likewise and points out that the “House of Representatives has also passed a resolu-tion endorsing the concept of a ‘Transat-lantic Partnership Agreement’ between the EU and the US.”

For those keeping track of congressio-nal malfeasance, this legislation, House Resolution 390, was introduced in the House by Nebraska Republican Doug Be-reuter on October 2, 2003. It passed the House little more than a month later on November 5. The resolution found that the “United States and the European commu-nity are aware of their shared responsibil-ity, not only to further transatlantic secu-rity, but to address other common interests such as environmental protection, poverty reduction, combating international crime and promoting human rights, and to work together to meet those transnational chal-

The Merkel factor: German Chancellor Angela Merkel (right) attends the “Globalization and transatlantic economy partnership” with Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmit (center) in 2007.

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lenges which affect the well-being of all.”Moreover, it found that because of the

“threats posed by global terrorism, ter-rorist states, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the nexus of the three, the partnership should be expanded progressively from a transatlantic commu-nity of values to an effective transatlan-tic community of action by developing a collaborative strategy and action plan for dealing with those challenges of mutual interest and concern.” (Emphasis added.)

Support NetworkThe passage of the Bereuter resolution in the House in 2003 strongly indicates that the TPN plan has the widespread support of influential members of Congress. It is not necessary to look far to find just how many influential legislators have backed the transatlantic integration plan.

One such backer was the late Republican Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois, the powerful and influential former chairman of both the House Ju-diciary and International Rela-tions Committees.

In its “Partnership Report” of June 2004, TPN notes that Hyde spoke in favor of creat-ing an EU-U.S. common mar-ket during a speech in Rome on June 29, 2003. Accord-ing to the TPN report, Hyde “stressed the need for a ‘Trans-atlantic Economic Framework

with the free movement of goods, services and invest-ments.” That, as economist Glen Atkinson pointed out, is the very definition of a common market.

But Hyde wasn’t fin-ished. He returned to this in a speech given in Chicago in September of 2003. In that speech, TPN points out, Hyde argued that America’s “economic relationship with

Europe receives too little attention” and that the United States should be looking more closely at “the benefits to be ob-tained from closer cooperation across the Atlantic.” Accordingly, TPN notes, “Hyde called for the establishment of ‘a true At-lantic Marketplace’ and urged the EU and the US to ‘convene a high-level meeting of our respective regulatory policy-makers and regulatory bodies to try to establish common objectives in regulation and de-vise a process of formulating complemen-tary regulations.’ ”

To put this in proper perspective, it should be noted that harmonization of law and regulation is a necessary prerequisite that must be accomplished before any economic or political integration of na-tions can occur. Finally, in 2004, Hyde,

along with Congresswoman Jo Ann Davis (R-Va.) and Minister of the European Parliament (MEP) Jim Nicholson, who was serving as Chairman of the European Parliamentary Delegation to the United States, signed a joint statement “calling for a barrier-free transatlantic market by 2015,” thereby officially endorsing the plan preferred by TPN.

There are many other important legis-lators on both sides of the Atlantic who continue to back the integration plan, and some of them actually serve as leaders within TPN itself. The most prominent of these is Republican Senator Robert Ben-nett of Utah. Bennett is chairman of the TPN Management Committee, one of the top leadership positions at TPN, accord-ing to the organization’s website. The honorary U.S. president of TPN is Robert S. Strauss, a key Carter administration of-ficial and former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. Joining Strauss and Bennett in TPN lead-ership positions are:

• Former Congressman Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) — now senior transatlantic fel-low at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S., another group promoting U.S.-EU integration;

• Democratic Congressman Ron Kind of Wisconsin, who has been an active

The emphasis placed on “top down” is not insignificant. as typically used by non-governmental organizations, that terminology usually implies that leaders will impose their desires on the citizens of a nation, not the other way around as envisioned by america’s Founders.

Terrorism deal: DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff (lower right) shakes hands with his German counterpart after signing an anti-terrorism deal on March 11, 2008.

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16

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supporter in Congress of regional free trade agreements;

• Former Congressman Mike Oxley (R-Ohio), infamous coauthor of the notorious Sarbanes-Oxley Act that, as described by Congressman Ron Paul, unconstitution-ally gave “the federal government author-ity to regulate the accounting standards of private corporations” in the wake of the Enron and other financial scandals of the early part of the decade.

In addition to these U.S. legislators serving in leadership positions with TPN, there are many others who are members of TPN’s “U.S. Congressional Group.” These include six senators — the aforementioned Senator Bennett of Utah, Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) — and 49 repre-sentatives. Some of the noteworthy mem-bers of the latter cohort include former Chairman of the House Judiciary Com-mittee F. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), recently deceased Chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee John Dingell (D-Mich.), and current House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). It seems that selling out U.S. sovereignty is a very popular and bipartisan pastime.

The Usual SuspectsAmong businesses and think tanks one finds the usual crowd of internationalists heading up the lists of those supporting the TPN program of transatlantic integration. European and American business mem-bers include such influential companies as Boeing, BASF, Microsoft, Coca Cola, General Electric, IBM, Time Warner, Walt Disney, Wal-Mart, Xerox, Merck, Nestle, UPS, and a host of others. The inclusion of media titans Time Warner (owner of CNN), General Electric (NBC), and Dis-ney (ABC News) perhaps explains in part the media blackout on the coverage of TPN’s activities.

Among think tanks, the TPN member-ship list is a who’s who of international-ism-promoting groups. Included on the list is the granddaddy of them all, the Council on Foreign Relations. Joining the CFR is the Atlantic Council of the United States, which seeks a “healthy transatlantic rela-tionship” as “an es-sential prerequisite for a stronger interna-tional system.” Other organizations serv-ing as TPN members include:

• The Brookings Institution

• The Carnegie Endowment for Inter-national Peace

• The Chamber of Commerce of the United States

• The German Marshall Fund of the U.S.

• The Centre for European Policy Studies

• The European Roundtable of Industrialists

• Institut Francais des Relations Internationales

All of these and several other groups have lent their support to the TPN goal of creating a Transatlantic Market by 2015. As umbrella organization TPN points out, this market is to be created by ex-ecutive decree from the top down, and that is exactly what has been happening. Meanwhile, the citizens who are being herded into this arrangement have no say in the matter. In fact, they are being kept in the dark. n

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Open skies: Under an agreement with the EU, U.S. air carriers can now land at European airports, like London’s Heathrow, that were previously off limits.

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by John F. McManus

Approximately 50 persons gath-ered in a plush conference room at the State Department on March

10. They were there for a meeting of the Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy (ACIEP), a fairly new group that serves as an advisory body to the U.S. government. They champion the Security and Prosperity Partnership and related organizations steering the United States toward more regional and interna-tional integration.

Washington lawyer and Council on Foreign Relations member Ted Kassinger, a former Deputy Secretary and General Counsel at the Department of Commerce, chaired the two-hour session. He was as-sisted by Assistant Secretary of State Dan-iel S. Sullivan.

All in attendance were immediately in-structed that the meeting would be con-ducted according to “Chatham House rules,” meaning that no person should be identified with any comments given dur-ing the proceedings. It would be permissi-

ble to mention what was discussed but no attribution is allowed. (Chatham House is another name for Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, the international-ist equivalent in that nation of the Council on Foreign Relations in America.)

The words “convergence,” “harmo-nization,” and “integration” were used frequently at the meeting, and each was characterized as the overall goal. Every dictionary I consulted states that “integra-tion” means creating a single entity.

Beyond frequent mention of NAFTA and the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) for North America, the participants delighted in discussing the Framework for Advancing Transatlantic Economic Inte-gration created in April 2007 by President Bush, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso. According to in-formation distributed at the meeting, this “Framework has put the United States and the European Union on a joint path toward further transatlantic economic integra-tion.” Claiming it possesses a “political commitment,” the framework has led to

“a new Cabinet-level Transatlantic Eco-nomic Council (TEC).”

About the TEC, the participants at the meeting stated, “We are in close contact with the EU.” “We have great hopes for more US-EU discussions.” “We want to reduce and harmonize regulatory bur-dens.” Referring to a previous meeting of the TEC: “It was simply wonderful to have this meeting [TEC] with our EU friends, and six [U.S.] cabinet leaders were in attendance along with the heads of two regulatory agencies [EPA and FDA].” Ob-viously, this TEC is paving the way for the integration of North America and the EU.

One speaker said it would be wise not to refer to what they were doing as “NAFTA Plus.” These globalists are obviously aware of growing public opposition to NAFTA. Another noted that “SPP builds on NAFTA,” which of course it does. Still another offered, “The security aspect of SPP is being directed by the Department of Homeland Security, and the prosperity aspect is being directed by the Department of Commerce.”

There were numerous references to

Standing shoulder to shoulder: In 2007, german Chancellor angela Merkel, president george W. bush, and European union Commissioner president Jose Manuel barroso created the Framework for advancing Transatlantic Economic Integration. Though the definition of “integrate” means to unify and bring together separate entities — as the Eu did in Europe — americans are not being told about this new arrangement.

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19THE NEW AMERICAN • MAY 12, 2008

REGIONALISM

Across the Atlantic, the United States and the EU are reaching for closer economic integration and more international regulations, but why are they doing it under the table?

Partners Across the Pond

progress already achieved (both within SPP and TEC) regarding standardization of some accounting procedures and regu-latory controls. New areas where further progress is being sought include harmoni-zation in the areas of biofuels, health, IT products, and RFID technology.

One participant noted, “Together, the North America and the EU nations add up to 11 percent of the world’s population and 58 percent of the world’s Gross Domestic Product.” He seemed unhappy about this disparity.

Another stated, “It was great progress when the North American Competitive-ness Council was launched at the Monte-bello SPP meeting.” “The NACC’s input from the private sector helps to harmo-nize what we are doing.” There are more than a dozen major U.S. corporations in the NACC, each profiting in the drive toward globalization. The firms weren’t named during the meeting, but they are Campbell Soup, Chevron, Ford, FedEx, General Electric, General Motors, K.C. Southern Railroad, Lockheed Martin, Merck, Mittal Steel, New York Life In-surance, Procter & Gamble, UPS, Wal-Mart, and Whirlpool.

One speaker dwelled on a program de-signed to defuse potential terrorism by creating jobs for young people who might become terrorists. He specifically men-tioned programs already being planned for the Pakistan/Iraq border and the Phil-ippines, and added that he would be going to Pakistan soon to work on this project.

While jobs are fading fast in the United States, he and others in attendance are working to create jobs elsewhere.

This prominent Washington-based in-ternationalist, a retired U.S. Army general who is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, promotes the flawed notion that terrorism springs from poor, unemployed and disadvantaged young people. The truth, however, is that leading terrorists like Osama bin Laden (a wealthy businessman) and Ayman al-Zawahiri (a medical doctor) are the highly educated and well-to-do types who generate the killing and destructiveness. Terrorism is not the product of the downtrodden. But it is the downtrodden who are used by terror-ism’s master planners to kill and maim.

Toward the very end of the two-hour program, I raised my hand and was given a chance to speak. I said:

I’m John McManus from The New AmericAN magazine. I want to note that several million American jobs have been lost since NAFTA, which many feel is somewhat responsible for these losses. And I note that no one from the Congress is in atten-dance at this meeting. I have two questions. One: do the SPP and TEC derive authorization from NAFTA to move ahead and tie the U.S. to more rules and regulations? And two: some Europeans (former German President Mr. Herzog, for one) note that as much as 80 percent of the laws being

enacted in their countries stem from the EU in Brussels. Does this com-mittee intend to duplicate for the U.S. what is occurring in Europe?

Kassinger immediately reminded me that Chatham Rules were in effect, and told me that I could address my questions to one of the State Department officials in attendance after the meeting. He quickly moved on to something else and the meet-ing ended soon. I was effectively quieted.

I waited around to speak to Assistant Secretary of State Sullivan after the meet-ing ended. A junior State Department em-ployee immediately appeared at my side, asked if I intended to question Sullivan, and stood by me for a good 10 minutes while others finished their comments to Sullivan. This was a bit unsettling. He remained at my side when I finally got a chance to talk to Sullivan.

To Daniel Sullivan, I repeated my ques-tion about NAFTA being the source of their authorization to proceed. He never answered. I asked how they could move ahead without any input from Congress and he danced around that too. I said, “Look, the SPP has 20 working groups at the Department of Commerce and they’re putting out reports and working on con-vergence and no one in Congress is in-volved.” At this point, the junior State De-partment official reminded me about the Chatham Rules, but Sullivan said he didn’t mind being quoted. When he sought to de-fend what they were advocating by dis-counting the fact that “some towels were being made” in a faraway land, I told him that there were many U.S. textile plants that had closed or downsized because of NAFTA. He didn’t like that, but didn’t respond.

I could see I wasn’t getting anywhere with Sullivan, so I handed him a copy of the “Merger in the Making” issue of The New AmericAN and told him that there are many Americans who are determined to protect the independence of the United States and don’t like what SPP and its re-lated groups are doing. He looked intent-ly at the cover of the magazine and said nothing.

I left. The junior State Department of-ficial carefully watched me as I walked down the corridor toward the door where I exited the building. n

U.S. Deputy State Secretary Daniel S. Sullivan was a participant of the advisory Committee on International Economic policy, a recently formed government advisory board that champions enacting international controls in such areas as biofuels, health, IT products, etc. Essentially, the group wants an international super-sized, super-powerful naFTa.

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Interview of Vaclav Klaus by William F. Jasper

On March 2-4, more than 100 sci-entists, many of considerable renown, attended a conference

in New York, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, called the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change. Also in

attendance were over 300 other delegates, including Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic.

Though he is not a climatologist or physicist, he was a featured speaker at the event for two reasons. First, he recognizes in the mannerisms and proposed public-policy recommendations of those trying to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions

the same noble-sounding goals and the same repressive political mecha-nisms as of the communists who so recently ruled his country with an iron fist. Second, he is a notable economist, formerly hold-ing a position in the Czechoslovak Academy of Sci-ences, and he can speak with author-ity about how the global-warming alarmists are mis-using data to jus-tify their claims.

The New Amer-icAN interviewed President Klaus at the climate conference.

The New Ameri-cAN: Why did you come to the Inter-

national Conference on Climate Change here in New York City?Vaclav Klaus: Well, I feel very strong-ly about it, not about global warming but for the discussion in principle. It’s not a discussion about the climate; it’s a discussion about human society; it’s a discussion about freedoms; it’s a discus-sion about human prosperity, especially in developing countries. That’s the issue which has been a topic for my whole life. Global warming is just an instrument for influencing the future behavior of man-kind. In this respect I am involved in the discussion.

tna: You come from the Czech Repub-lic; you are familiar with what it is like to have freedom totally suppressed. How does freedom relate to this issue?Klaus: I am sensitive, maybe overly sensi-tive in this respect, but I listen to speeches of some global-warming alarmists — en-vironmentalists in general. I hear sentenc-es, ideas, which sound to me very familiar from the communist era.

Again there is someone who wants to orchestrate our life, again someone who knows better than the rest of us what is good for me, for us, and who tries to regulate, control, mastermind human so-ciety and in this respect there is a struc-tural similarity with my experiences from the past.

tna: Are you also familiar with the way that statist systems will claim a scientific basis to justify their policies?Klaus: They are misusing science. Again, I say with the communists it was also sci-ence which was also misused as an instru-ment for influencing us. There was scien-tific Marxism at the time and now we have scientific environmentalism — it was the same.

tna: Very similar parallels …


INTERVIEW

Living under communism, Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, saw how repressive political mechanisms can stifle opposition and control society. He sees the same pattern being repeated in today’s global-warming debate.

A ClimAte of RepRession

vaclav klaus

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Klaus: Yes, somewhat. I think that many people are misled by the argument that the debate about climate change is a scientific debate in the field of climatology. I don’t think that is the case. What we are talking about is influencing human society, and in this respect it is much more about social sciences, my own field of economics, and not that much about the details of physics and other scientific disciplines.

tna: In that regard, one of the things that’s been quite prevalent in this case is closing off scientific debate.Klaus: To close the scientific debate is again, a weapon against those who dis-agree. I know that there is no scientific consensus. There can never be scientific consensus in this respect. The closing of the scientific discussion is really a very dangerous way of looking at things and

can have very unpleasant conse-quences for human society.

tna: Tell us about your concern on that level, the economic and so-cial consequences of the policies which are being advocated.Klaus: As an economist — by the way, I have to stress that I wrote a book about it, Blue Planet in Green Shackles: What Is Endan-gered, Climate or Freedom? — my answer is of course freedom.

The book is more from the position of a social scientist and economist than from a position of a climatologist. I have just one chapter devoted to techni-cal issues. I see the scientific discussion not as a climatolo-gist, but as an economist. I can follow the significant literature, but I don’t want to be someone

who contributes to the scientific literature. Nevertheless, I can compare the two approaches.

As an economist, I have one relative comparative advantage. We are dealing with time-series data. So in this respect, climatology and economics are comparable and similar. In both fields it’s a huge complex system and it’s a system where you can’t make controlled experiments. So the statistical theory, in our case econometric, is some-thing very similar to the same discussions in climatology.

I’ve spent 10 or 15 years of my life doing mathemati-cal modeling, statistics, and econometrics. I think I have some knowledge about how to deal with time-series data, which is the same story in cli-matology. This is my interest.

I see a misuse of data. I see a misuse of statistical techniques used to analyze the data, to interpolate and extrapolate the data. This is what bothers me as an economist. I’m really very unhappy with the simplification of analysis.

We, I mean economists, live in the world of cost-benefit analysis of a serious risk aberration discussion. The global-warming alarmists live in the world of pre-cautionary principle — for me nonsense. I have never seen that principle in all the textbooks I have studied in my life.

Plus, as an economist I started to be really involved in this discussion when I discovered how irrationally discounting principles are used in the global-warm-ing alarmism. That wasn’t, by the way, the motivation for me to start writing the book. Originally I just wanted to write a short piece, a short article, about discount-ing — misuse of discounting in the Stern Report.

That was my original ambition and when I wrote the piece and wanted to publish it as an article. I discovered there is no publi-cation useful for it, so I started to extend it. Originally the idea was to make it a short booklet, and then it became a book.

But the discounting discussion is a cru-

“To close the scientific debate is … a weapon against those who disagree.... The closing of the scientific discussion is really a very dangerous way of looking at things and can have very unpleasant consequences for human society.”

— Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus


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vaclav klaus addressing the un Climate Summit

cial part of it. This is some-thing the climatologists do not discuss.

tna: What would imple-menting some of the drastic or even moderate so-called proposals of the global-warming alarmists mean for the people of the Czech Republic?Klaus: Well, I don’t want to distinguish the Czech Republic from other coun-tries. The Kyoto Protocol will have a minuscule im-pact upon the climate. It’s almost difficult to find sta-tistical significance of the Kyoto Protocol. Neverthe-less, the costs are very, very heavy, and I don’t think it’s very smart to do that.

On the other hand, for me, “economy” is about economizing, it’s about saving, it’s about rational behavior, so I don’t mind some saving of energy —

It’s About FreedomThe following is excerpted from an address by President Vaclav Klaus to the Interna-tional Climate Conference in New York City on March 2-4, sponsored by the Heartland Institute.

First, i would like to thank the organizers for this important conference, for mak-ing it possible and for inviting one politically incorrect politician from Central europe to come and speak here.a politician, as was just mentioned, who in spite of his views on climate, was two weeks ago reelected as president of his country. and the point is that everyone in the Czech republic knows my views on climate change. i am, i think, a living demonstra-tion of the fact that politicians can be elected with such views on climate change....i know it’s difficult to say anything interesting and new after so many speeches and discussions here. But when i look around, there are not many speakers from former communist countries here. as an economist, i always try and find my comparative advantages.

each of us has his or her experiences, prejudices, preferences. the ones that i have are quite inevitably connected with the fact that i have spent most of my life under the communist regime. a week ago i gave a speech … at the Prague Castle commemorat-ing the 60th anniversary of the 1948 communist putsch in the former Czechoslovakia. One of the arguments there quoted in all the leading newspapers in the country the next morning went as follows: “Future dangers will not come from the same source. the ideology will be different. its essence will nevertheless be identical. the attrac-tive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good on the one hand, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality on the other.”yesterday morning i read the excerpts from the Czech press and i discovered that the chairman of the Czech green Party dramatically criticized this statement of mine. i think it’s very good that he understood it.... [laughter from audience]my central argument was, “what is endangered, climate or freedom?” my answer is clear and resolute. it’s our freedom, i may also add, and our prosperity....in spite of their public roles, [global warming’s exponents] maximize their own private … good, power, prestige, career, income, and so on.i am afraid there are people who really want to stop the economic growth, the rise in the standard of living — though not their own — and the ability of man to use the expanding wealth, science, and technology for solving the actual pressing problems of mankind, especially of the developing countries.the climate alarmists believe in their own omnipotence; they believe in knowing bet-ter than millions of rationally behaving men and women what is right or wrong....i am afraid we have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society. now it concerns the whole of mankind, not just the citizens of one particular country....to sum up, it is not about climatology. it’s about freedom. n


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that’s the last thing I would criticize.Nevertheless, to a priori introduce

the targets for limiting the use of en-ergy without knowing how to increase [the efficiency of that same energy] is for me a joke for the next several gen-erations in the world — I don’t want to speak for the most developed coun-tries within the world. For the unde-veloped, economic development will still be based on fossil fuels. And to stop it is definitely impossible.

tna: But as an economist you could see very definitely a negative impact in many ways on human society?Klaus: That is quite clear. As an economist … I know that when there is economic growth — the growth of income — that the people pay more attention to all kinds of environmental issues, including the climate.

So, I am absolutely sure that just as spontaneous [activity and coopera-tion] will solve the problems, it’s not necessary to mastermind society from above as the global-warming alarmists basically try to do.

tna: Do you see encouraging devel-opments in Europe with regard to roll-ing back the onslaught of the alarm-ists’ trend of the last few years?Klaus: I am afraid that it will be dif-ficult. Nevertheless, this is the task for all of us to do it in the future. However, I am afraid global-warming alarmism will continue marching on, and we will get on the slippery road to serf-dom, to use the phrase from [econo-mist Friedrich] Hayek’s terminology. This is what we once experienced in our country, and I don’t want to expe-rience it again.

tna: We appreciate your coming here to share with us here at this conference. Any last comment?Klaus: I must say I was just asked by the Czech press agency what was the net contribution I got here. I said, “Well, even with all my strong views, I must say I was slightly reinforced in my views by seeing so many very competent scientists — their speech-es, their presentations.” It was slightly better than I expected. n

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INTERVIEW

by Laurence M. Vance

Although tax season has come and gone once again, the various pro-posals for tax reform are still with

us. These tax-reform plans, even though they appear outwardly to be quite differ-ent, have one thing in common that dooms them from being taken seriously by advo-cates of liberty and less government: they are all revenue-neutral plans seeking the most fair and efficient way to fund the fed-eral government’s ever-increasing, multi-trillion-dollar budgets.

The current federal tax code found in the 20 volumes of Title 26, “Internal Revenue,” of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations is a complex, intrusive monstrosity. With its progressive brackets (10, 15, 25, 28, 33, and 35 percent) and refundable tax cred-its, it is used to redistribute wealth while funding the interventionist welfare/warfare state. Since the surest way to return the size, scope, and cost of the federal government to its proper constitutional authority is to cut off its funding, there is no question that most of the tax code needs to be sub-stantially eliminated and the rest radically overhauled. But could the cure offered by a tax-reform plan be worse than the diseased federal tax code it is designed to replace?

Gaining MomentumJudging from its well-organized and highly vocal supporters, chief among tax-reform proposals would have to be the FairTax, a progressive national retail sales tax. The FairTax is the brainchild of three businessmen concerned about the crip-pling effects on the economy of the cur-rent federal tax code. After adopting the name “FairTax” for their tax-reform plan, they formed Americans for Fair Taxation

Laurence M. Vance is a freelance writer who has re-

viewed both of Boortz and Linder’s FairTax books.


TAXES

Congressman John Linder’s FairTax legislation would change the method used to collect taxes without changing the amount. Is this what the American taxpayer really needs?

Is Making Taxes “Fair” the Answer?

in 1997 and enlisted Representative John Linder (R-Ga.) to introduce FairTax legis-lation in Congress. Linder first sponsored the “Fair Tax Act” in the House in July of 1999, and has reintroduced a FairTax bill at the beginning of every term of Congress since then.

The current incarnation of Congressman Linder’s FairTax is H.R. 25, the “Fair Tax Act of 2007.” The bill has 70 cosponsors, including former presidential candidates Thomas Tancredo (R-Colo.) and Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.). Notably absent from the list of cosponsors is Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), widely acknowledged as the taxpayer’s best friend because of his consistent voting record against unconsti-tutional spending. Although the FairTax bill is currently languishing in the House Committee on Ways and Means (as it does each time it is introduced), the FairTax it-self has been in the news of late because of its support by two prominent individuals: Mike Huckabee and Neal Boortz. Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was a vocal supporter of the FairTax during his presidential campaign. Radio talk-show host Neal Boortz is the

author, with Congressman Linder, of the recently published FairTax: The Truth, Answering the Critics (2008), which is a sequel to their previously published The FairTax Book (2005).

The FairTax is a progressive, revenue-neutral consumption tax in the form of a na-tional retail sales tax on all services and the final sale of all new goods. Services such as tuition and job-related training courses are exempt. All other services are subject to the FairTax, including medical procedures, fu-neral services, rent, and haircuts. Purchases for business or investment purposes are ex-empt. The FairTax is only levied on new goods, but the tax is absolute — nothing is exempt. This means that new construction, new cars, food, and all Internet purchases of new goods would be taxable.

The FairTax is designed to replace the personal income tax, corporate income tax, estate tax, gift tax, unemployment tax, alternative minimum tax, Social Se-curity tax, and Medicare tax. Under the FairTax proposal, there would no longer be taxes on capital gains, interest, divi-dends, gambling and lottery winnings, self-employment earnings, or income of

any kind. But there would also no longer be tax deductions for home mortgage in-terest, charitable contributions, casualty or theft losses, and medical expenses. Ad-ditionally, the FairTax does not eliminate tariffs, federal excise taxes, special federal taxes on things like airline tickets, or any state and local taxes.

The FairTax system includes a monthly payment from the federal government to all households to reimburse them for the sales tax paid on basic necessities. The amount of this “prebate” is based on the government poverty level and family size. Initially, a family of four would receive a monthly rebate of $525. The prebate is not in any way based on income; Bill Gates would even get it.

The appeal of the FairTax is quite obvi-ous: no more complex tax code, no more taxes withheld from paychecks, no more 1040 forms, no more record keeping, no more compliance costs, no more business decisions based on tax consequences, no more social engineering with the tax code, no more IRS audits of individuals, no more April 15, etc. The prebate merely sweetens the deal.

Since the FairTax, like all current tax-reform plans, is revenue neutral, it is predicated on the supposition that any tax-reform plan must allow the federal govern-ment to raise the same amount of revenue that it does currently. This means that rath-er than lowering the overall tax burden of the American people, the total amount of taxes the federal government extracts from the citizens of the United States would be the same as it is now. All federal programs, all federal agencies, all federal projects, all earmarks, all pork-barrel spending — they would all continue just as now. Thus, Con-gress can continue its spending orgy while appearing to lower taxes. Put another way, the FairTax is meant to allow the federal government to confiscate the wealth of its citizens more efficiently. The FairTax also shifts the debate from how much wealth the federal government confiscates to the manner in which it is done.

The FairTax perpetuates the fallacy that the government has a right to confiscate a percentage of the value of each new good sold and every service rendered. This is no different than claiming that the gov-ernment has a right to the portion of each American’s income that it takes under

Holding it high: During his bid for the presidency, Mike huckabee called to rid the country of the present federal tax system and replace it with a national sales tax called the FairTax.

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the current system. As the late economist Murray Rothbard explained:

The consumption tax, on the other hand, can only be regarded as a pay-ment for permission-to-live. It im-plies that a man will not be allowed to advance or even sustain his own life, unless he pays, off the top, a fee to the State for permission to do so. The consumption tax does not strike me, in its philosophical implications, as one whit more noble, or less pre-sumptuous, than the income tax.

The FairTax is also a highly progressive system — perhaps even more so than our current system according to FairTax ad-vocate Neal Boortz. Thus, like the pres-ent system, it favors “the poor” over “the rich.” Although everyone would pay the same rate under the FairTax (when pur-chasing goods and services), many Ameri-cans would pay no taxes at all, and many more would have most of their taxes off-set, thanks to the monthly prebate.

Tricky DictionMathematically, the FairTax just doesn’t add up. The stated rate of the FairTax is too low to achieve revenue neutrality, and the amount by which prices would fall under

a FairTax system — because of the removal of the cost of taxes that are currently embedded in the price of all goods — has been grossly exaggerated.

The rate of the FairTax is al-ways given as 23 percent. Some-times the caveat is added that the rate is figured inclusively (the tax is included in the price of the product) rather than exclusively (the tax is added to the price of the product). But how many pick up on the caveat and how many are fully aware of the FairTax promoters’ sleight of hand in how they calculate the tax in prac-tical terms?

Suppose you buy a $1.00 item, though, admittedly, there’s very little you can buy these days for $1.00. If a 23-percent tax is added to the cost of an item, you’d expect to pay a total of $1.23. But that’s based on calculating the tax exclusively — not how the FairTax would be calculated. The Fair-Tax would be calculated inclusively, mean-ing that 23 percent of the total cost of the item would have to be applied to the Fair-Tax. For that to be the case, a $1.00 item would actually cost $1.30 when the Fair-Tax is applied — the additional 30 cents (or 30 percent) being 23 percent of $1.30.

Wouldn’t it be simpler to understand if

the FairTax were promoted as a 30-percent tax as opposed to a 23-percent tax that’s calculated inclusively? Of course it would be, but it wouldn’t be as marketable. Ob-viously, it is much easier to sell a national sales tax if the rate is “only” 23 percent. The fact remains, however, that under the FairTax system, everyone will pay an extra 30 cents on the dollar to purchase a new good or service regardless of whether he thinks the rate is 23 or 30 percent. And in spite of what the rate may in fact be, some economists don’t think that either of these rates would be high enough to make the FairTax revenue neutral. The FairTax also artificially broadens the tax base by requir-ing governments to pay taxes on goods purchased and salaries paid. This results in the absurdity of the federal government

paying taxes to itself.Although it seems like the

exchange of most federal taxes for the FairTax would lead to higher prices on all new goods and services because of the imposition of a national sales tax, FairTax proponents claim that the removal of embed-ded taxes would result in the prices of goods and services falling by enough to offset the amount of the FairTax im-posed. However, this would not be the case. Advocates of the FairTax are correct that the current price of consumer products includes embedded taxes, but they are mistaken concerning their amount and their effect if removed. There are just not enough embedded taxes to be removed to offset the FairTax. Personal income taxes, which account for al-

The FairTax is designed to replace the personal income tax, corporate income tax, estate tax, gift tax, unemployment tax, alternative minimum tax, Social Security tax, and Medicare tax. It does not eliminate tariffs, other federal taxes, or any state and local taxes.

Buy used for no tax: Under the proposed FairTax, new products including big-ticket items like vehicles and houses, would be hit with a 23/30 percent sales tax. By buying used items, the tax could be bypassed.

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most half of all federal revenues, are borne by consumers, not embedded in product costs. The FairTax would not eliminate any excise taxes embedded in the costs of goods. It is mainly corporate taxes and the employer share of social insurance taxes that are embedded taxes. And although we can be certain that retail prices will increase by 23/30 percent under the FairTax, we don’t know with any certainty how much they will decrease after the embedded taxes in the price of goods are removed.

But, it could be argued reasonably by FairTax proponents that even if the costs of goods and services go up somewhat after the imposition of the FairTax, the combi-

nation of higher take-home pay (because of the elimination of withholding taxes), the prebate, and the elimination of the costs of complying with the tax code will result in a lower overall tax burden. Well, to begin with, this assumes that the stated rate of the FairTax would be high enough to achieve revenue neu-trality — a very dubious propo-sition. Secondly, since state

and local governments would have to pay taxes to the federal government under the FairTax, they would have to raise their taxes to cover the new taxes they would have to pay, thus increasing the overall tax burden. Thirdly, the federal government would have to come up with an additional half a trillion dollars to pay out the pre-bate. Since the prebate is not included in the federal budget right now, the overall tax burden would have to increase by the amount of the prebate. And then there are the extra billions of dollars that the federal government will need to pay the FairTax to itself. This means, of course, that the FairTax is not really revenue neutral at all.

Finally, there won’t be a great savings of tax-preparation dollars because the Fair-Tax is only a federal tax, and states will still be forcing corporations and individu-als to prepare returns.

Auditing the FairTaxPractically, there are a number of prob-lems with the FairTax as well.

First, maintaining that the FairTax is a “fair” tax system, or one that is “fairer” than our current system, is highly subjec-tive. As Boortz himself acknowledges in his new book on the FairTax: “Whether a tax system is ‘fair’ is a complicated eco-nomic and philosophical question, one that inevitably involves oversimplification and subjective judgment.”

Second, FairTax proponents have made so many grandiose claims for the FairTax that it is hard to take them seriously. The FairTax, they say, will result in unprec-edented economic growth, a tremendous increase in capital investment, substan-tially lower interest rates, the creation of millions of new jobs, the saving of Social Security and Medicare, the doubling of the economy within 15 years, and the great-

est transfer of power away from the government ever seen. It is also claimed that the FairTax is voluntary since one could choose not to purchase a new good and therefore not have to pay any tax on it. But aside from the fact that one can-not purchase used food, the FairTax is a voluntary tax only in the sense that the present system is “volun-tary”: if one chooses not to earn any income under the current system then one doesn’t have to pay any income tax. One must buy things as a matter of course to live in a modern society.

Third, the FairTax elimi-nates neither the 16th Amendment nor the federal tax code. Nor does it elimi-nate what is now called the IRS. To repeal the 16th Amendment would require another amendment. And contrary to the claims of

The problem with the tax code is not that it is too complex, too intrusive, too long, too full of loopholes, too unfair, or too progressive. The problem is that it is used to feed the federal leviathan in the amount of almost $3 trillion a year.

Burgeoning food bill: if the FairTax, a national sales tax, is enacted, food prices will likely jump significantly. Price jumps on other products may be more moderate because of corporate tax-related cost savings being passed on to consumers. Farm taxes, on the other hand, are already greatly mitigated by write-offs and subsidies.

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FairTax promoters, calling the IRS by an-other name while redirecting its mission is hardly eliminating it. Just as the income tax would be replaced by the FairTax, so the IRS would be replaced by the “Sales Tax Bureau” in the Treasury Department. The FairTax bill also wouldn’t replace the federal tax code. It repeals four subtitles, redesignates seven others, and adds a new one that implements the FairTax.

Fourth, adopting the FairTax doesn’t mean that the income tax couldn’t be re-imposed. Congress might simply decide to resurrect the income tax because it is not politically expedient to raise the rate of the FairTax. This could be sold to the American people by lowering the FairTax rate, reinstituting the income tax, and then claiming that the combination of the two was revenue neutral. And even if the 16th Amendment were repealed, there is noth-ing preventing Congress from implement-ing some form of an income tax.

Fifth, the FairTax prebate will give some people more money “back” than they paid in (national sales) taxes, much like the earned income tax credit does

today. Like any refundable tax credit, the prebate is just another income-redistribu-tion scheme.

And sixth, FairTax proponents are very naïve to think that Congress wouldn’t turn the FairTax into a monstrosity just as hid-eous as the current tax code. The rate of the FairTax could be raised at any time. The exemptions currently on certain ser-vices could be removed. The prebate could be subject to a means test, or simply elimi-nated for upper-income taxpayers and in-creased for seniors, the poor, minimum-wage earners, and anyone receiving public assistance.

Reducing TaxesThe fundamental problem is clearly taxa-tion itself, not the tax code. The problem with the code is not that it is too complex, too intrusive, too long, too full of loop-holes, too unfair, or too progressive. The problem is that it is used to feed the federal leviathan in the amount of almost $3 tril-lion a year.

Since it is a tax-reform proposal instead of a tax-reduction proposal, the FairTax

merely changes the way that taxes are collected. It is an incremental step toward neither lower tax rates nor lower taxes. And it is certainly not a plan to return the size, scope, and cost of the federal gov-ernment to its proper constitutional au-thority. With President Bush’s proposed new budget topping $3 trillion and the national debt fast approaching $10 tril-lion, the need of the hour is clearly to rein in government spending, not change the way the government raises its revenue. FairTax proponents have the proverbial cart before the horse. Their energy is mis-directed. As Congressman Ron Paul has remarked on several occasions: “The real issue is total spending by government, not tax reform.”

The income tax should be repealed, not replaced. The IRS should be abolished, not given a new name. Tax reform should re-sult in revenue reduction, not revenue neu-trality. Because the FairTax falls far short of these goals, it should not be considered a “fair” tax. It should therefore be rejected by all Americans who favor a return to the limited government of the Founders. n


by James Perloff

T raditionally minded Americans don’t often cheer Hol-lywood products. We gladly report an exception: Ex-pelled: No Intelligence Allowed (rated PG).

As many New AmericAN readers know, Charles Darwin’s the-ory of evolution transformed Western culture. The Bible taught that life forms are creations of God, with man the centerpiece, made in God’s image. Darwin introduced a new doctrine: ran-dom interactions of chemicals had created life, and man was just an animal, evolved from lower life forms through survival of the fittest. Sold to the public as scientific fact, “Social Darwinism,” with its view of man as beast, helped spawn unprecedented cru-elties under communism and Naziism.

Now, however, science has evolution on the retreat. For example:

• A single cell, which Darwin thought “simple,” is encoded with information that would fill thousands of books, and is far too complex to have formed by chance.

• In his book Darwin’s Black Box, Lehigh University bio-chemist Michael Behe demonstrates that certain biochemical systems, such as blood clotting and the immune system, are “irreducibly complex” — that is, they consist of interdependent parts that cannot function in lesser stages, and thus cannot have evolved step-by-step.

• In Not by Chance, Dr. Lee Spetner, who taught information theory at Johns Hopkins University, documents that random mu-tations — evolution’s alleged building blocks — cause losses of genetic information, not gains.

• In Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, molecular biologist Mi-chael Denton shows that, on a cellular level, there is no evidence for the proclaimed evolutionary sequence “fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal.”

As the new data has emerged, evolutionists have fought to

prevent classrooms from openly discussing the weaknesses in Dar-win’s theory. Freedom of speech has been sup-pressed in academia, and educators persecuted for daring to address intelli-gent design (ID). It was this trend that prompted the documentary Expelled.

According to the film’s website, the project “began with an observation made by [co-producer Walt] Ruloff, a successful com-puter software entrepreneur who comes from a high-tech world in which innova-tion is constant and eagerly sought. In stark contrast, he noticed, the scientific and academic communi-ties were deeply resistant to in-novation, in this case innovation that might revise Darwin’s theory that random mutation and natural selection drive all variation in life forms.”

The film’s host and narrator is Ben Stein, economist, law pro-fessor, speech writer for Presidents Nixon and Ford, and author of over 20 books, but probably best known as a comedy actor, with his trademark monotone voice. He is also a pro-life cre-ationist, making him a maverick in Hollywood.

James Perloff is author of Tornado in a Junkyard: The Relentless Myth of Dar-

winism. (See ad on the inside back cover.)


MOVIE REVIEWMOVIE REVIEW

Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed makes an intelligent case for pursuing the scientific evidence wherever it may lead — including even intelligent design.

Allow Intelligence!

Liberty and Justice — for All?“Scientists are supposed to be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it may lead, no matter what the implications are,” says Stein. “Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-science, it’s anti-American.” The film underscores America’s tradition of per-sonal freedom with visits to landmarks such as the Jefferson Memorial and Wash-ington Monument, and contrasts these with images of the Berlin Wall, symbol of tyranny. That wall is gone, but another, we learn, has been erected in American universities.

Stein interviews double Ph.D. biolo-gist Richard Sternberg, a research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. In 2004, as editor of Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Sternberg allowed publication of a peer-reviewed article sug-gesting there is evidence for intelligent de-sign in nature. This resulted in a vicious, smear-tainted campaign of abuse against Dr. Sternberg, driven by certain Smithso-nian officials and by the National Center for Science Education (self-described as a “clearinghouse for information and advice to keep evolution in the science classroom and ‘scientific creationism’ out”). The at-tack on Sternberg was so outrageous that it led to a congressional investigation and an ensuing report, Intolerance and the Politi-cization of Science at the Smithsonian.

Among others, Stein also visits:

• astrophysicist Guiller-mo Gonzalez, who, de-spite publishing over 60 articles in peer-reviewed science journals and being credited with helping dis-cover new planets, was refused tenure at Iowa State University after he advocated teaching intel-ligent design;

• molecular biologist Caroline Crocker, com-pelled to leave George Mason University after including several slides about intelligent design in one of her lectures;

• NASA-honored en-gineering professor Rob-ert J. Marks II, forced by

Baylor to remove an ID-friendly website from the university’s servers.

But Stein doesn’t just meet intelligent design’s defenders, he also takes on some of its most adamant critics, including Eugenie Scott, executive direc-tor of the National Center for Science Education; Michael Shermer, founder of the Skep-tics Society; Cornell professor William Provine; and athe-ist blogger P.Z. Myers. Ulti-mately he travels to England to confront Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and probably the most vocal critic of ID and creation.

Producer Ruloff warns: “People will be stunned to actually find out what elitist scientists proclaim, which is that a large majority of Amer-icans are simpletons who be-lieve in a fairy tale.”

During his interview, Dawkins dismiss-es religion as “primitive superstition,” and those who reject evolution for it “ig-norant or insane.” Logically questioned by Stein, Dawkins admits that life could have come from “a higher intelligence” that “seeded” it on this planet — i.e., he could accept aliens as our creator, but not

God. But this begs for an answer to the question: how did life get started on the aliens’ planet?

Ideas Have ConsequencesCreation-evolution is a vital issue. It is far more than a science discussion. Most Americans believe, as Thomas Jefferson said, that “men are endowed by their Cre-

The other side: ben Stein does not confine his interviews to intelligent-design supporters. In a climactic part of the film, he takes on famed atheist Richard Dawkins (left), author of The God Delusion. ex

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ator with certain unalienable Rights.” If, as Darwinism says, there was no Creator, then there is no basis for rights, no moral absolutes, nor any God to whom we are accountable for our actions.

Small wonder, then, that Darwinism has always found a comfortable home in totalitarian states. Stein visits the former mental institution at Hadamar, Germany, where over 14,000 mentally ill were once executed by the Nazis. As Stein notes, Charles Darwin advocated eugen-ics, writing that “the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breed-ing of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.... Excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” Stein explores the link between Darwin and Nazi eugenics, interviewing Cali-fornia State University professor Rich-ard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler. And he notes that eugenics was espoused in America by Planned Parent-hood founder Margaret Sanger.

The film also exposes media bias. In-telligent-design advocates tell Stein how

the politically correct press has distorted their positions. Journalist Pamela Win-nick recounts the abuse she received after trying to report on the evolution-design controversy in a balanced manner. A dis-comforting moment for Americans comes in the film when Polish scientist Maciej Giertych tells Stein that there is less cen-sorship on this issue in Poland today than in the United States.

A Model of CommunicationExpelled strikes a blow for free speech, and is drawing much-needed attention to the creation-evolution battle. It has been effectively marketed by Motive Entertain-ment, which also took on The Passion of The Christ and The Chronicles of Narnia. Motive’s appealing website for the film, www.expelledthemovie.com, along with grass-roots promotion from advocates of creation and intelligent design, has spurred a groundswell of demand.

Atheists have been bitterly denounc-ing the film. Atheist P.Z. Myers declared: “It’s going to appeal strongly to the reli-gious, the paranoid, the conspiracy theo-rists, and the ignorant — which means they’re going to draw in about 90% of the

American market.” Such attacks have un-intentionally served as further promotion. On April 18, Expelled opened in 1,052 theaters, breaking the record for docu-mentaries (Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 opened in 868).

Expelled is not your grandfather’s docu-mentary. A fast pace, rocking soundtrack, and Stein’s deadpan humor all defy that word’s connotations. The interviews never drag — they are interspersed with clips from old films to underscore points being made. There are two superb animation sequences, one demonstrating the cell’s complexity, the other a satirical “casino of life” in which hundreds of slot machines must simultaneously hit jackpots in order for life to commence by chance. This movie will leave you entertained and in-formed (we know plenty these days that do neither).

Near the film’s end, shots of the Ber-lin Wall coming down remind us that the walls of academic censorship must fall also. Stein’s final words exhort audience members to get involved.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is a model of communication that all can learn something from. n

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Moment of truth: ben Stein ponders the meaning of Darwinism.


MOVIE REVIEW

Helping the Homeless to Help ThemselvesSeveral months ago, Virginia Snyder of Lodi, California, began thinking of a way to help her city’s homeless people. She began speaking to outreach groups, in-cluding many homeless people, to gather insight on how to help those who had taken a wrong turn in life get back on the road to stability and productivity. Snyder was not interested in merely giving handouts to the homeless; she wanted to find a way to get them get off the streets permanently. She initially called her program: “A Hand Up, Not a Hand Out.”

Back in January, the Lodi News-Senti-nel ran a story about Snyder that prompted many local residents to call her and offer to help. As more people got involved, a board was formed and a permanent organization, with the name “A Hand Up — Homeless Outreach,” was formed.

The group was not set up to accept mon-etary donations, but did accept donations of people’s time and their services. One volunteer, Gary Kellam, a deacon at Grace Presbyterian Church, started collecting leftover food every Friday at a local res-taurant and at a women’s shelter, which he distributes at a city park. However, along with the food, he encourages the homeless to attend church, to get sober, and to im-prove themselves one step at a time.

A big part of the outreach group’s work with the homeless is teaching them to overcome destructive personal habits in order to allow them to live peacefully in the community. “If the homeless want to be treated respectfully, they have to respect others,” Snyder told the News-Sentinel.

Their approach works. Scott Greeson, a former street person who was plagued by alcoholism, said: “I’ve been trying to get clean since 1977, and this is the first time I’ve done it on my own.” The out-reach group has helped other homeless individuals kick drug habits and become productive again.

Snyder freely acknowledges that she could not have accomplished this work of mercy without widespread community support: “The people of Lodi are so gener-ous. I am just so impressed.”

Atlanta Woman Donates Kidney to GirlLast September, Laura Bolan noticed a flier posted at the suburban Atlanta el-ementary school that two of her children attend. The flier told about a little girl named Sarah Dickman, a student at the school, who needed a kidney transplant. Sarah’s parents, Lori and Joe Dickman, had already placed their daughter on a national waiting list for transplant re-cipients, but posted the flier to give their daughter an extra chance at finding a suit-able donor.

The flier listed Sarah’s blood type, and Bolan knew she was the same type, so she called the number on the flier that evening. The Dickmans received another call from someone offering to donate a kidney, but tests revealed that Laura Bolan was the better match of the two.

Sarah had been born with juvenile nephronophthisis, a genetic disorder that slowly destroys the kidneys. Like most people with kidney disease, she was a di-alysis patient, and the catheter required to connect her to the blood-filtering machine limited her activities.

“It breaks your heart to know there’s a little girl sick out there who you could help,” Bolan said in an AP interview.

After months of preparation, both pa-tients underwent surgeries on February 21 at hospitals across the street from each other in Atlanta. Both patients were doing well afterwards and tests showed that Sarah’s kidney was working normally.

Before her surgery, Sarah looked forward to going to Kangaroo Bob’s, a popular local children’s play center that has slides, mazes, and obstacle courses that had been unsafe for her to negoti-ate previously. “I’ll get to go there on my birthday because I won’t have this any-more,” she said, pointing to her dialysis catheter.

“We definitely need more people like Laura in the world,” said Lori Dickman, Sarah’s mom.

And Laura’s generous act inspired Sarah’s dad, Joe Dickman, to want to do likewise; he has added his own name to a kidney donor list.

New England Patriot Helps CommunityTroy Brown is best known as number 80 on the New England Patriots and is the team’s all-time leading receiver with 557 career receptions. But his hometown is Marshall, West Virginia — where he played foot-ball and majored in computer science at Marshall University — and he currently resides in Huntington, West Virginia.

When not playing football, Brown spends as much time as he can with his wife, Kim, and their two sons, and giving generously of himself to the Huntington community.

“[Troy] does a lot of things that people aren’t aware of, and he does it out of the goodness of his heart, not to get any kind of publicity,” Kim told the Herald- Dispatch (Huntington, W.Va.).

Among the ways Brown has given of himself has been serving as the communi-ty ambassador for Hospice of Huntington and on the board of directors for the local Girls and Boys Club. Troy and Kim have both started a local tutoring and mentor-ing program. Troy has also directed local football camps and sponsored and coached youth basketball teams. When in Massa-chusetts playing with the Patriots, he has led similar efforts in the Bay State.

In recognition for his community work, Troy was honored at a “celebrity roast” held in Huntington on March 6 to benefit Camp Good Grief, a children’s bereave-ment camp hosted by Hospice of Hun-tington. (During last year’s Hospice Bowl, Troy and Kim helped raise $10,000 for the camp, which is for eight-to-16-year-olds in the area who have lost loved ones.) But Kim said that her husband was nervous about the event: “He’s not one to enjoy the spotlight too much. He’s really a laid-back, kind of behind-the-scenes guy.”

Chad Pennington, a player for the New York Jets who also once played for Mar-shall, and who met Brown there in 1995, told the press: “His story is a great incen-tive for young people to continue to work hard and continue to believe in themselves. It’s not too often you get to roast a guy who’s as good as Troy.” n

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by W.W. “Chip” Wood

Several years ago, my youngest son and I were watching a program on the History Channel when the pro-

gram’s narrator mentioned the capture of a Naval vessel by Communist North Korea back in 1968.

“That didn’t really happen, did it, Dad?” my son asked me. When I replied

that it had, he was stunned. “Do you mean to tell me that North Korea seized one of our ships, beat and tortured the crew for most of a year, and we didn’t do anything about it?”

I was shocked that my son had never heard of the USS Pueblo before. And em-barrassed that the answer to his question was “yes.” Somehow, that whole sorry episode had been blotted out of the history books. I wonder — how many of you read-ing these pages now know the story? How about your children — or their children?

At the time the Pueblo was captured, the sum total of our country’s efforts to engineer the release of the sailors was

to “protest vigorously.” Many of us did everything possible to get our leaders to act, but to no avail. After the sailors were finally released, I helped set up a nationwide speaking tour for one of them, radio officer Lee R. Hayes, when I was on the staff of the John Birch Society. Hayes gave hundreds of speech-es arranged by the JBS Speak-ers Bureau and participated in thousands of media interviews. The loyalty, sacrifices, and pa-triotism of Hayes and his fellow crewmen were an inspiration to all of us at the time.

The story of the Pueblo de-serves to be much better known today.

Seizure and ImprisonmentThe ship that became known as the Pueblo was launched at the Kewaunee Shipbuilding and En-gineering Company in Kewaunee, Wisconsin, on April 16, 1944. It was known simply as Army cargo ship FS-344. In 1966, it was transferred to the Navy, renamed the Pueblo, and began service as a light cargo ship.

The following year, the Pueb-lo was converted into an intelli-

gence-gathering ship. In May 1967, it was redesignated AGER-2 — AGER standing for Auxiliary General Environmental Re-search, a euphemism for spying operations the ship would conduct on behalf of the National Security Agency.

In January 1968, the Pueblo was or-dered to patrol off the coast of Commu-nist North Korea. The ship left the Navy base in Sasebo, Japan, to conduct surveil-lance of Soviet naval activity in the Tsu-shima Straits. The ship was also ordered to eavesdrop on any electronic transmissions it could intercept that originated in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as that communist captive called itself.

W.W. “Chip” Wood was the first news editor of The

Review of the News and also wrote for American

Opinion, our two predecessor publications. He now

writes a weekly column called “Straight Talk,” which

is free for the asking at www.straighttalkletter.com.

The spy ship Pueblo, disguised as a general Environmental Research vessel, was seized by Communist north korea in January 1968.

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— PAST AND PERSPECTIVEHISTORYHISTORY

In January 1968, North Korea seized the USS Pueblo. The story of the ship’s brave crew and how their vessel remains a tourist attraction in Pyongyang should not be forgotten.

The Story of the Pueblo

Within hours of reaching its destination in the Tsush-ima Straits, the Pueblo was harassed by Soviet or North Korean vessels, despite the fact that it was in internation-al waters. On January 21, the ship reported that a modified Soviet-style sub-chaser passed within two miles of its bow. The next day, two apparent fishing trawlers from North Korea (which were probably Soviet spy ships) passed with-in 25 yards of the Pueblo.

The next day, January 23, 1968, the Pueblo was ac-costed by a sub-chaser that demanded to know its iden-tity. In response, Command-ing Officer Lloyd M. Bucher ordered that the U.S. flag be raised. The North Korean ves-sel then ordered the ship to stand down or be fired upon.

Instead, the Pueblo fol-lowed the orders it had been given back in Japan and tried to leave the area. It could not outrun the sub-chaser, however. Short-ly after, three torpedo boats appeared on the horizon and joined in the chase. The attackers were subsequently joined by two MiG-21 jet fighters. Soon, a fourth torpe-do boat and a second sub-chaser appeared on the horizon.

The North Koreans pulled alongside the Pueblo and tried to board the ship. When Commander Bucher ordered the Pueblo to take evasive maneuvers, two North Korean vessels opened fire on the ship. Suddenly, cannon fire and machine-gun bullets were raking the vessel.

The Pueblo was ill-prepared to with-stand such an attack. Its armament con-sisted of two Browning .50-caliber ma-chine guns — hardly a match for rockets and missiles. Moreover, the machine guns were wrapped in cold-weather tarpaulins and the ammunition for them was stored below decks.

As the cannon fire continued, Com-mander Bucher gave the order to “stop engines” and signaled the North Koreans that he would comply with their orders. He also ordered his own crewmen to begin de-stroying as much of the sensitive materiel as possible that was on board the ship.

The North Koreans ordered the Pueblo to follow them to the mainland. At first, the ship complied. But again — following orders it had been given in Japan — the ship stopped before it crossed the 12-mile limit into North Korean waters.

When this happened, the North Koreans once again opened fire on the ship. This time, one sailor — Fireman Apprentice Duane Hodges — was killed. North Ko-rean forces from a torpedo boat and a sub-chaser boarded the Pueblo. Our sailors were blindfolded and had their hands tied behind their backs. Once they were help-less, they were beaten and prodded with bayonets.

The Pueblo had been in radio contact with Naval security back in Japan through-out the incident. The Seventh Fleet com-mand told Commander Bucher that help was on the way. It turns out this was a lie; no jets or ships were ever dispatched to come to the aid of the ship.

No one at Seventh Fleet headquar-ters was willing to give the order to try to rescue the Pueblo. The decision was bucked back to Washington — first to the Pentagon, then to the White House. By the time then-President Lyndon Johnson was informed of the situation, the Pueblo was in North Korean waters. It was de-

cided that any rescue attempt would be too dangerous.

There is considerable controversy about where the Pueblo was when it was cap-tured. Commander Bucher and the other ship’s officers subsequently testified under oath that at no time did the Pueblo enter within 12 nautical miles of the North Ko-rean coast. This is the generally accepted limit of claims for territorial waters. At the time, however, the North Koreans claimed a 50-nautical-mile sea boundary. No one disputes that the Pueblo was within 50 miles of the Korean coast.

In any case, once the ship was within 12 miles of North Korea, the Pueblo was boarded again — this time by some high-ranking North Korean officials. The Pueblo was taken into port at Wonsan on the eastern coast of North Korea. The 82 surviving U.S. crewmembers were taken to a prisoner-of-war camp somewhere in the interior of the country. The men were starved and repeatedly tortured. Their treatment got worse when someone real-ized that crewmen were secretly giving them “the finger” in staged propaganda photos.

Commander Bucher was singled out for particularly harsh treatment, including facing a mock firing squad. He refused to

Pueblo crewmen in a staged propaganda photo use “sign language” to express their opinion of their captors.

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buckle when faced with his own death, but finally relented and agreed to sign a confession when his captors threatened to murder his crewmen, one by one, in front of him.

Since his captors couldn’t read English, Bucher was ordered to write his own con-fession. None of the North Koreans picked up on a play on words that Commander Bucher included in his “confession.” He wrote, “We paean the North Korean state. We paean their great leader, Kim Il Sung.” Read aloud, “we paean” sounds remark-ably like “we pee on.” Get it?

During the course of 1968, the men were moved to a second prisoner-of-war camp, while negotiations for their release dragged on. Finally, in December of that year — 11 long months after the Pueblo was captured — the United States gave North Korea a written apology acknowl-edging that the ship was spying and prom-ising that it would never happen again.

On December 23, 1968, the crew of the Pueblo was taken by bus to the demilita-rized zone separating North Korea from the south and the men were permitted to walk across “the Bridge of No Return.” Commander Bucher led the long line of crewmen, with his second-in-command, Executive Officer Lt. Ed Murphy, bring-ing up the rear.

Once the officers and crew reached safety in South Korea, the United States retracted its admission, apology, and assurance.

Betrayal and LoyaltyIn the aftermath of the apparent collapse of the Soviet Union, we learned that the capture of the Pueblo was instigated by the Soviet Union, which very badly wanted a cryptographic machine that was on board. John Anthony Walker, an American traitor who had pro-vided the Soviets with literally hundreds of thousands of secrets, had given them a key to deciphering our cyphers; now they needed to get their hands on the actual machine. Seizing the Pueblo provided that opportunity.

After the sailors’ release, Commander Bucher and the 81 other surviving of-ficers and crew aboard the Pueblo were then ordered to face a Naval Court of In-quiry, which concluded by recommend-ing that Bucher and Lieutenant Steve Harris (the officer in charge of the intel-ligence equipment on board the ship) be court-martialed for their “dereliction of duty.” There was no apparent action taken against the Naval officers in Japan who

lied to Commander Bucher about assis-tance being sent.

Secretary of the Navy John H. Chafee rejected the Naval Court’s recommenda-tion, saying, “They have suffered enough.” Commander Bucher was never found guilty of any malfeasance and remained on active duty until his retirement. He died in 2004, partly as a result of complications from the injuries he received while he was a prisoner of war in North Korea.

During the inquiry, there was some de-bate about whether or not Commander Bu-cher acted within his orders. He admitted that part of his orders were “not to spark an international incident.” But he and his officers were adamant that they had not come within 12 nautical miles of the Ko-rean coast. (Today, of course, global posi-

The north koreans pulled alongside the Pueblo and tried to board the ship. When Commander bucher ordered the Pueblo to take evasive maneuvers, two north korean vessels opened fire on the ship. Suddenly, cannon fire and machine-gun bullets were raking the vessel.

President Johnson tells reporters in February 1968 that negotiations have failed to secure the crew’s release. our sailors would be tortured and starved for nine more months.

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37

tioning satellites could have confirmed the ship’s location within a matter of inches.)

Some critics argued that the ship should have left the area after the first incident. But such encounters were considered rou-tine at the time. U.S. forces frequently tested the territorial limits of Cold War op-ponents. If such actions caused the enemy to mobilize its military, there would be even more information to gather.

Moreover, testimony during the in-quiry made it clear that the Pueblo had not been informed that Communist North Korea had become increasingly bellicose recently, threatening all sorts of reprisals

against its enemies and even sending “hit squads” into South Korea. Such infor-mation might have caused Commander Bucher to act differently. So of course, there was no reason for the Pueblo’s crew to expect any-thing other than a normal and routine mission.

The Pueblo was eventu-ally moved by the North Ko-reans from Wonson on the

east coast of North Korea to Nampo on the west coast. The trip required moving the vessel through international waters for several days, as it was towed around South Korea. Although the U.S. military had to have been aware of the Pueblo’s location, no effort was made to retake or sink the ship. To the best of my knowledge, there was never a court of inquiry — or any embarrassing questions at a White House press conference — about why this was allowed to happen.

The Pueblo subsequently was taken to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, where it is the most popular tourist attrac-

tion in the city. Thousands of visitors have been shown the ship’s secret communica-tions room, still in a partially disassem-bled state from when the ship was seized. A popular souvenir of a visit is a photo-graph taken while a tourist stands behind the machine gun mounted at the rear of the ship. Yes, the same guns that remained wrapped in a tarpaulin during the attack and seizure.

It has been claimed that the USS Pueblo was the first naval vessel to be seized by an enemy since the wars in Tripoli two centu-ries earlier. This is not quite true; on De-cember 8, 1941 (one day after the attack at Pearl Harbor), the river gunboat USS Wake was captured by Japanese forces while moored in Shanghai.

It is true that the USS Pueblo remains a commissioned vessel of the United States Navy to this day. It is sad that the ship has been abandoned by our leaders. But it would be tragic if its story were forgotten by our citizens. n

Commander bucher was singled out for particularly harsh treatment, including facing a mock firing squad. he refused to buckle when faced with his own death, but finally relented and agreed to sign a confession when his captors threatened to murder his crewmen.

The captured USS Pueblo is the most popular tourist attraction in the capital of Communist North Korea.

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More Tax Dollars to Bail Out the Housing MessiTem: The Hill newspaper for April 1 reported: “It is unclear how many home-owners would be rescued from foreclosure through a plan proposed by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) that is gathering steam in Washington.” The Capitol Hill publica-tion continued: “Frank himself now says it is ‘irrelevant’ how many people will be helped under the plan, which Con-gress could take up over the next month. ‘I would hope a million [would benefit],’ said Frank, chairman of the House Finan-cial Services Committee. ‘It’s irrelevant. There’s no downside. Why not try?’”iTem: In its April 10 edition, the Washing-ton Post reported: “The Bush administra-tion yesterday unveiled a plan to rescue 100,000 homeowners at risk of foreclo-sure by relaxing eligibility standards for government-backed loans and encourag-ing lenders to forgive a portion of their debt. The proposal was quickly criticized by consumer groups, who said it would do little to slow a mortgage meltdown that last year threw more than 1.5 million households into foreclosure. But it was embraced by key Democrats, who said the White House is acknowledging that more aggressive government action is needed to help the most hard-pressed borrowers who owe banks more than their homes are worth because of plunging prices.”iTem: “After weeks of gridlock — and a presidential veto threat — the Senate passed a bipartisan housing package Thursday that Democratic leaders say President Bush will sign,” reported the Christian Science Monitor for April 11. “The $15 billion Senate package includes tax breaks for home builders and home-owners, $100 million to boost mortgage counseling for families, and $4 billion in block grants for communities to purchase and rehabilitate foreclosed properties. It’s one of several measures now on a fast track on Capitol Hill to show voters that Congress is capable of responding to a deepening housing crisis now affecting financial markets across the world.”correcTioN: The various leading hous-

ing bailout proposals in Washington range from bad to worse. However, they do have similarities: each would delay the market’s recovery and cause more pain in the long run.

More than 92 percent of the first mort-gages in the United States were being paid on time at the end of 2007; fewer than 8 percent were delinquent. The expensive and intrusive rescue efforts are aimed at the latter, bailing out lenders and borrow-ers by putting the taxpayers on the hook, in one fashion or another, for speculators who seemed to think the market would go up forever, bankers who made bad loans, and homeowners having difficulty paying their debts.

Federal programs that extended unwar-ranted credit, such as requiring banks to extend loans in high-risk areas, helped distort the housing market. Predictably, Washington is responding by further ex-panding the role of government, guaran-teeing more credit, and rewarding reck-lessness — as if one could put out a fire by fanning its flames.

President Bush’s proposed rescue, for example, involves propping up the Fed-eral Housing Administration that dates back to FDR’s early days in office. For some time, points out John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Bush has

been championing “this New Deal agency, even before the credit crunch began. And using rhetoric often indistinguishable from Democrats such as [Barney] Frank and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), admin-istration officials have sung the agency’s praises. Take Brian Montgomery, HUD’s assistant secretary in charge of FHA. The Associated Press … quoted him as saying that ‘the entire mortgage market needs the stability that FHA brings.’”

“But far from bringing stability to the mortgage market, over the past decade — under both the Clinton and Bush ad-ministrations — the FHA’s underwriting methods have rivaled the carelessness of many subprime lending practices, and have contributed to current housing woes. The delinquency rate on FHA-backed mortgages has been close to that of the subprime category and has sometimes even exceeded it. In the last quarter of 2006, for instance, the delinquency rate for subprimes had increased to 13.33% in the industry’s National Delinquency Sur-vey. But in the FHA category, the rate had risen to 13.46 percent — ‘a new record.’ This is especially disconcerting consider-ing that FHA borrowers are said to have better credit records than many who get subprime loans.”

As usual, the Democrats have criticized

Money manipulation: house Financial Services Committee Chairman barney Frank says the government must bail out people who are delinquent on their mortgages because “everybody — homeowners, lenders, neighbors, indeed our entire economy — is worse off when a foreclosure occurs.” but that is not true; prospective homebuyers and their prospective loan originators stand to gain much.

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the Bush administration for not being in-terventionist enough in the marketplace.

Accordingly, the repair legislation that has been emerging from the Democrat-led Senate is even more extreme. Not that some Republicans in the Upper House didn’t also make mischief. For instance, Senator Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) tacked on a $7,000 tax credit to buy homes out of foreclosure. As the Wall Street Journal noted, this “means that Americans who be-haved responsibly and paid their mortgage but are now trying to sell their homes will have to cut their offering price by $7,000 to compete with foreclosed properties nearby. Thus does the Senate contribute once again to tax fairness and personal responsibility.”

This is hardly the only thing wrong with the Senate bill. As pointed out by William Niskanen, chairman of the Washington, D.C.-based Cato Institute:

The Senate has again demonstrated that its guiding principle is “Don’t just sit there. Do something really dumb in response to the current per-ceived crisis.” This week’s example is the Foreclosure Prevention Act, which passed the Senate by a vote of 84 to 12. One provision of this act is a temporary $7,000 tax credit for

buyers of foreclosed properties, the primary benefits of which would ac-crue to those grieving bankers who made bad loans. Another provision is a temporary tax deduction worth up to $1,000 for families who pay property taxes, the primary beneficia-ries of which would be high-income home owners. The most expensive provision is a three-year tax break for homebuilders, which would increase the supply of unsold homes and delay the recovery of housing prices.

Some senators showed understanding about what has been happening. “This bill need-lessly spends billions of dollars to bail out lenders, makes our tax code even more complex and will do little to nothing to stimulate our economy,” said Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). “In fact, this bill could have the perverse effect of increasing the number of foreclosures and reduce home values for American families nationwide.”

For its part, the House more than matched the counterproductive efforts of the Senate, while trying to camouflage its bailout attempt as refinancing. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, blew his own horn, bragging that his piece of legislation has “no downside.” Not so. Frank’s proposal

actually “will put billions of taxpayer dollars at risk and undermine the already successful Hope Now program,” observed the Heritage Foundation. “Hope Now is a voluntary alliance of scores of servicers, investors, counselors, and other mortgage market participants ranging from Catho-lic Charities to the Bank of America. Par-ticipants in the alliance seek to reach out aggressively to potentially at-risk, credit-worthy homeowners to help them rework their mortgages. With the help of the Hope Now alliance, the mortgage indus-try is helping more than 160,000 families a month to keep their homes either by modi-fying their loans or by developing more realistic repayment plans.”

It doesn’t take a conservative to recog-nize the problems with Frank’s approach. The chairman’s proposal has “two glar-ing problems: one moral, the other eco-nomic,” comments Robert Samuelson in Newsweek:

About 50 million homeowners have mortgages. Who wouldn’t like the government to cut their monthly payments by 20 or 30 percent? But Frank’s plan reserves that privilege for an estimated 1 million to 2 mil-lion homeowners who are the weak-est and most careless borrowers. With the FHA now authorized to lend up to $729,750 in high-cost areas, some beneficiaries could be fairly wealthy. By contrast, people who made larger down payments or kept their month-ly payments at manageable levels would be made relatively worse off. Government punishes prudence and

Reality of real estate: in the real estate market, there have always been periods called sellers’ markets — like we’ve just experienced for many years — where home prices steadily rise and buyers must move quickly to purchase a home they can afford. And there are buyers’ markets, where home sales stagnate and buyers can choose amongst many affordable homes. Government intervention in the market — such as mandating issuing loans to people with poor credit — makes the swings in the cycles more pronounced and hard on everyone.

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rewards irresponsibility. Inevitably, there would be resentment and pres-sures to extend relief to other “needy” homeowners.

Frank is more than willing to use the force of government to twist the arms of lend-ers who might resist modifying their loan terms. The Financial Services chairman, reported Thomson Financial News, “said he wanted to ‘put the servicers on notice, we can’t make them cooperate, but if we see a widespread refusal to cooperate on what we see as an important economic problem,’ then, when Congress rewrites the U.S. financial regulatory system next year, ‘they can expect much tougher regu-lation in the future.’”

The current crisis, as noted, has been aggravated by past interference in the market such as the Community Reinvest-ment Act, a law pushed by so-called liber-als used to pressure lenders to make loans to people who are poor financial risks, including many minorities. Now Senator Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) has the chutzpah to complain that “subprime loans are five times more likely in predominately black neighborhoods.” She is not alone.

Clinton of course has her own federal answer: dictating that there be no more foreclo-sures for three months is one of her dazzling ideas. She would also have Washington essential-ly rewrite private contracts by placing an “automatic freeze” on adjustable-rate mortgages at their below-market-value introductory rates for “at least five years” or until they could be converted to conventional loans at affordable rates.

Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.), her presidential rival, thinks that is foolish, saying, “A blanket freeze like she’s pro-posed will drive rates through the roof on people who are try-ing to get new mortgages to buy or refinance a home.” The fact that he’s correct in this regard does not mean that he has the

right response. Indeed, he would be even more inept with his supposed solution.

“Obama’s main concern,” writes Alan Reynolds in the New York Post, “is that it’s been much too easy for low-income families to get home mortgages. He plans to put a stop to that by 1) threatening lenders with fines and prison and 2) let-ting judges tear up the contracts and write new ones. Ironically, one reason we got into the current mess is that Washington spent the last few decades criticizing and fining mortgage lenders for not lending to low-income households with imperfect credit records — a practice called redlin-ing. Now Obama plans to punish lenders in criminal and bankruptcy courts until they bring redlining back.”

It has taken a long, perverse chain of events to bring about the housing bubble and subprime mortgage mess. Yet, when you track back to find the genesis of the predicament, you invariably find the hand of an overly intrusive government. Rep-resentative Ron Paul (R-Texas) has out-lined how this game has been played, not-ing that the Federal Reserve “creates new money and uses it to purchase securities from banks. Flush with funds, these banks

seek to put this money to use. During the Fed’s expansionary period, much of this money went to home loans. Through a combination of federal government in-ducements to lend to risky borrowers, and the Fed’s supply of easy money, the housing bubble took shape. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were encouraged to purchase and securitize mortgages, while investors, buoyed by implicit govern-ment backing, rushed to provide funding. Money that could have been invested in more productive, less risky sectors of the economy was thereby malinvested in sub-prime mortgage loans.”

Paul continued: “The implicit guarantee from the Fed is quickly becoming explicit, as those institutions deemed ‘too big to fail’ are bailed out at taxpayer expense. Wall Street made a killing during the housing bubble, reaping record profits. Now that the bubble has burst, these same firms are try-ing to dump their losses on the taxpayers.”

Unfortunately, the rash responses of the federal bailout artists are bound to lead to even more troubles. These would-be rescuers would probably pour water on a drowning man. n

— William P. Hoar


Good Samaritan AttackedOutside a supermarket in Pittsfield Town-ship, Michigan, a man saw another man try to push a woman into a van. He assumed that the woman might be in trouble because she and the man who was pushing her were arguing loudly. He approached and asked if she was okay. The other man “told him to mind his own business, and they left in the van,” according to Mlive.com.

Fearing for the woman’s safety, the man called the police and then left. At a stoplight the same van pulled up, and the male from the van began yelling. When the good Samaritan got out of his vehicle, he was punched in the face and knocked down. Then, incredibly, “two women, in-cluding the woman he tried to help, got out of the van and began hitting and stomping the victim while he was on the ground.”

A passerby saw the beating taking place, pulled a gun, and held the three attackers until police arrived. Arrested for the Feb-ruary 13 attack were an 18-year-old man and two 19-year-old women. “The victim was not seriously injured.”

Tapping the Same Well Again and AgainTracey Ann McQueen of Fayetteville, West Virginia, was free on bond after bur-glarizing a Fayette County home on No-vember 4 of last year. On January 16, she was caught burglarizing the same house.

About 4:45 a.m., the female homeowner woke up and saw McQueen in her house, and so she grabbed a small-caliber revolver and confronted McQueen. When she told McQueen to wait for police, McQueen at-tacked her. They struggled until the gun discharged, striking McQueen in the hand and sending her fleeing.

McQueen was caught and charged in the incident. According to the Register Herald, “McQueen was also considered a primary suspect in at least one other previous incident at the same residence. Reports indicate the victim’s house had been burglarized on several other occa-sions during the past few months.” Mc-Queen had apparently previously lived in the area.

Whom Shall We Believe?Rob Pierce, Jr. claims he was walking to his fiancee’s mother’s Easton, Penn-sylvania, residence, when two strangers, Tyrone Wright and Maurice Cook, tried to mug him.

The Morning Call reported that Pierce “became suspicious when Cook, 22, of Easton, and Wright, 22, of Newark, N.J., who were walking behind him, picked up their pace and narrowed the gap as all three made their way to S. 11th Street about 5:30 p.m. Dec. 4.” Pierce said he “knew something was wrong when he heard them call out ‘Yo,’ or ‘Hey.’”

So he unholstered his registered pistol and slipped it into his coat pocket. Cook ran up and stuck a gun in Pierce’s back, and Wright got in front of Pierce, grabbing him. “The muggers took Pierce’s keys and cell phone, then dragged him toward the east side of the street while telling him to cooperate and be quiet.” They also told Pierce they were going to shoot him.

So Pierce tried to stand up; he pulled his pistol; and he shot into the air to scare the two men. At the shot, Wright fled, but Cook stepped back and began shooting, first into the ground and then at Pierce. Pierce then aimed at Cook’s legs and began shooting. Pierce hit Cook in the stomach, causing him to flee.

Police caught up to Wright and Cook when Cook sought medical attention. At the men’s arraignment, their lawyers claimed that Pierce was the aggressor in the inci-dent, that Pierce said something to them about some woman, pulled a gun, and shot Cook while Cook was attempting to disarm Pierce. But are they to be believed?

Consider a few facts. Wright just got out of prison on October 29 and admits to being in a violent gang called the Crips. Upon initial questioning, Wright gave the police a fake name and several Social Se-curity numbers and birth dates as his own. Cook’s lawyer is denying Cook had a gun though the police found a weapon near the scene. Also, though Cook is a felon who is not supposed to carry a gun and denies having had a gun, bullet holes mar a house and two vehicles where Pierce said the gunfight took place. Cook claims that he was shot while struggling with Pierce, but

his friend Wright says Pierce just started shooting for no good reason. The two men did not seek aid from the police.

On the other hand, Pierce, who has a concealed-carry permit, asked a storeown-er to call the police. Pierce also called the police himself from his future mother-in-law’s residence nearby. Pierce unloaded his gun, set it down, and waited for the police to arrive.

Not too surprisingly, the judge in the case felt there was enough evidence to charge Cook and Wright and sent them to jail to await trial, pending $250,000 bail each. On the other hand, somewhat surprisingly, the Northhampton County District Attorney John Morganelli publicly supported con-cealed-carry laws and hopes “thugs” get the idea that victims may fight back.

Action HeroRod Wolff is one cool cowboy. While a rob-ber was pointing a gun directly at him from a few feet away, Wolff grabbed his own pistol and began firing, squeezing off three shots at the robber. But being calm in a life-threatening situation is probably a little more normal for Wolff than for most peo-ple: he is a professional stuntman who has worked in major films such as Rambo III.

Wolff is also a hair-salon owner, and it was at the hair salon that the action took place on March 18. He was in a back room when he heard his wife use the code word that indicated a robber was in the store. He grabbed the salon’s gun, carrying it in the towel it was hidden in, and walked to the main room of the salon where a rob-ber wearing a wig and dark sunglasses was pointing a gun at his wife and several patrons.

When Wolff walked into the room, the robber trained the gun on him, but when the robber averted his gaze, Wolff yanked the gun out of the towel and began shoot-ing, hitting the robber. The robber made it outside, but Wolff pursued him, caught him at his SUV, and held him for police. The robber was listed in critical condition. The police confiscated Wolff’s gun while they investigate the shooting, prompting Wolff to bring another one to the salon. n

— KurT williAmSeN


“... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” EXERCISING THE RIGHT

When President George W. Bush announced a new greenhouse gas reduction

goal in his April 16 Rose Garden speech on climate change, environmentalists and politicians who have been warning for years about global warming were not impressed. German Environment Minis-ter Sigmar Gabriel was harsh in a written statement issued from Berlin headlined: “Gabriel criticises Bush’s Neanderthal speech. Losership, not Leadership.” In Washington, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) echoed the sentiments of many Democrats — and some Republicans too — when he called the president’s proposal “too little, too late.”

“Too little, too late”? What should the president have done sooner? And how much more should he have done? Well, Gabriel noted in his statement that there are “other voices in the United States” that take combating global warming seriously. Indeed there are. Consider this warning uttered by a U.S. presi-dent some years ago:

The issue of climate change respects no border. Its effects cannot be reined in by an army nor advanced by any ide-ology. Climate change, with its potential to impact every corner of the world, is an issue that must be addressed by the world....

The process used to bring nations together to discuss our joint response to climate change is an important one. That is why I am today committing the United States of America to work within the United Nations framework and elsewhere to develop with our friends and allies and na-tions throughout the world an effective and science-based response to the issue of global warming....

My administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change. We recognize our responsibil-ity and will meet it — at home, in our hemisphere, and in the world....

I’ve asked my advisors to consider approaches to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.... Our approach must be consis-tent with the long-term goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

Should George W. Bush have made a commitment such as this after becoming president? Well, he did. The president who made these remarks was not Bill Clinton following a script prepared by Vice President Al Gore. The president was George W. Bush sounding very much like Al Gore. The date: June 11, 2001.

But wait, didn’t Bush oppose the Kyoto Treaty? He did, but not because he disagreed with the treaty’s underly-ing assumption that man-made green-house gases threaten the environment and must therefore be reduced. He sim-ply disagreed with particulars, such as the fact that developing countries that pump greenhouse gases into the atmo-sphere are exempt from the require-ments of the Kyoto treaty. China, the president pointed out in his 2001 glob-al-warming address, is “the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases” and yet exempt from the treaty’s requirements.

In 2001, President Bush opined that global warming is “a challenge that requires a 100-percent effort; ours, and the rest of the world’s.” He hasn’t changed his mind. In his April 16, 2008 address, he noted that Kyoto expires in

2012 and called for “a binding international agreement” includ-ing all “major economies.” At the upcoming “major economies leaders meeting” in July, he said, “we will seek agreement on a long-term global goal for emissions reductions, as well as an agreement on how national plans will be part of the post-2012 approach.”

In his speech, Bush also announced a new national goal: “to stop the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025.” And he pointed to his administration’s accomplishments combating global warming, such as working with Congress to pass energy legislation specifying “a new fuel economy standard of 35 miles per gallon by 2020” and requiring “fuel producers to supply at least 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel by 2022.”

That being the case, why would German Environment Min-ister Sigmar Gabriel view this as a “Neanderthal” speech? The answer, of course, is that it does not go nearly far enough to sat-isfy those who argue that greenhouse gases must be cut now and must be cut drastically through caps on greenhouse emissions in order to save the Earth from environmental havoc. Even Bush’s fellow Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger said that though he commends the president “for acknowledging that we have a cli-mate change problem and a responsibility to address it … the time for real action is now.”

The irony, as this magazine has repeatedly pointed out,* is that we are not confronted with a global-warming problem, and the real “Neanderthal” position is that taken by global-warming Chicken Littles. And that very much includes George W. Bush when he sounds like Al Gore. n

* Click on “Environment” under “Topics” at www.thenewamerican.com.

Has Bush Gone Green?


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