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Progressivism’s Failed Foreign Policy

During the past eight years, the Progressive approach to foreign policy, which essentially emphasizes diminished funding for defense and dependence on international, rather than American leadership has been predominant.

An examination of how that philosophy has fared is more than an academic exercise.  Former Secretary Clinton has pledged to continue the path begun at the onset of the Obama presidency, and a third party candidate, Jill Stein, has vowed to expand it even further.

Progressivism should not be confused with any past practice. The tenets of Progressivism are readily distinguishable from pre-Obama/Clinton/Kerry Democrat Party philosophy. Consider how these quotes from President John F. Kennedy would have been received at the 2016 Democrat convention:

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to insure the survival and the success of Liberty.”

“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

Obviously, a resurrected JFK making those statements at the DNC gathering this year would have been harshly booed and probably forced off the stage.

Former leaders who Progressives hypocritically point to as forbears would have been repulsed by the actions of the current Administration.

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Woodrow Wilson actively sought to impart a fair value system to the world; the Obama Administration has pandered to the worst offenders, most recently illustrated by the stunning delivery of cash to Iran, and the acceptance of Russian/Iranian hegemony in the Middle East.  It shouldn’t be forgotten that the current round of fighting in that region, following the fall of Saddam Hussein, began with the rise of ISIS, which would not have occurred if American troops remained in Iraq, and Russian/Iranian support for the despicable Syrian regime of Bashar al Assad, who has used artillery and poison gas against his own people to continue his murderous rule. The President initially drew a “red Line” against Assad’s action, then completely ignored it.

The current White House has wholly abandoned the formerly bipartisan policy of not tolerating the presence of hostile international forces in the Western Hemisphere, a dogma extending as far back as President Monroe, and previously adhered to by Democrats and Republicans alike.  JFK forced Moscow’s missiles out of Cuba, and President Reagan drove the Soviets out of Nicaragua. Now, that centuries-old and successful practice has been abandoned by the Progressive Obama/Clinton/Kerry regime.  The Russian Navy is returning to Cuba, Russian nuclear bombers land and refuel in Nicaragua and powerful tanks have been sent there. Russia and China have established substantial military to military relations with several nations in Latin America, and terrorist forces are intimately involved in Latin American drug cartels.

Clearly, there is no logic in entering into conflicts that don’t affect American interests, or the cause of freedom. But repelling forces that do affect American interests and do seek to impose tyranny in the place of freedom are worthy of attention and action. Over the past eight years of Progressive rule, a premature withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq allowed ISIS to become the power it is today. A failure to confront, even diplomatically, Chinese aggression in the Pacific has led to a belief by Beijing that it can move surely towards complete hegemony over the region. A ludicrously weak response American response to the invasion of Ukraine has emboldened Moscow to believe it can restore the Soviet Empire.

As China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have dramatically ramped up their military strength and acted aggressively across the world stage, Progressive leadership in the White House has decreased defense spending and bent American will to international opinion.

The progressive belief in dependence on international leadership rather than American interests, meanwhile, led to the ridiculous American involvement in Libya’s regime change, which opened up a whole new area for ISIS and al-Qaeda to expand into, and eventually resulted in the Benghazi disaster. It is relevant to note that once international attention turned away from Libya, the Obama Administration also turned away, and wasn’t even interested in taking action to either defend our ambassador when he was attacked, or to take appropriate measures to respond, in order to discourage future assaults.

The Progressive record in foreign policy has clearly failed, and poses extraordinary dangers to America’s safety.

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A candid discussion on American socialism

Do progressive policies actually accomplish solid results?

As several presidential candidates ask Americans to seriously consider an openly progressive agenda, it is appropriate to examine how that concept has fared in actual practice. The goals of the hard left are in line with President Obama’s desire to “fundamentally transform” America.

Throughout most of its history, the United States has experienced unprecedented economic growth and mobility though an essentially capitalist philosophy. Market conditions which encouraged growth and entrepreneurship allowed vast numbers of Americans to advance economically into the middle class and beyond.

As a possible reaction to the poor results of the Obama presidency, free-market advocates or conservatives have, according to the Gallup polling organization, outnumbered both moderates and liberals since 2009.

However, as presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders has openly identified himself as a socialist, and his Democrat opponents Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley have for the most part agreed with his policies in an attempt to solidify their support with the left wing of their party, the question of “fundamentally transforming” America from a free market to a progressive/socialist economy has risen to the forefront.

The progressive concept, which is essentially been the mantra of the currently ascendant left wing of the Democrat party.

Progressive policies can be distinguished from other programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which are essentially funds taken from individual paychecks then returned to the taxpayers at a later date when eligibility sets in. Progressive policies center on the concept of “redistributing” wealth from those who have earned or produced it to those who have not.

The late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once remarked that ““The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

As Geroge Will “America’s national character will have to be changed if progressives are going to implement their agenda…consider the data Nicholas Eberstadt deploys in National Affairs quarterly: America’s welfare state transfers more than 14 percent of GDP to recipients, with more than a third of Americans taking ‘need-based’ payments. In our wealthy society, the government officially treats an unprecedented portion of the population as ‘needy.’ Transfers of benefits to individuals through social-welfare programs have increased from less than one federal dollar in four (24 percent) in 1963 to almost three out of five (59 percent) in 2013. In that half-century, entitlement payments were, Eberstadt says, America’s ‘fastest growing source of personal income,’ growing twice as fast as all other real per-capita personal income. It is probable that this year, a majority of Americans will seek and receive payments. This is not primarily because of Social Security and Medicare transfers to an aging population. Rather, the growth is overwhelmingly in means-tested entitlements. More than twice as many households receive ‘anti-poverty’ benefits than receive Social Security or Medicare.”

It is appropriate to note that as those entitlement programs have soared, including a 41% in the supplemental nutrition assistance program (food stamps) social security benefits for seniors have suffered, enduring the lowest amount of cost of living increases on record. Indeed, the social security program itself is facing bankruptcy, since funds that should have gone to insure its solvency have been diverted to progressive programs.

A study of American cities and states where progressive concepts have been used provides an important glimpse into what results the growing trend towards socialist government can be expected to yield.

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Newt Gingrich, quoted in Front Page , has noted that “Every major city which is a center of poverty is run by Democrats. Every major city. Their policies have failed, they’re not willing to admit and the fact is it’s the poor who suffer from bad government.” Since 2013, of the large American cities with significant poverty rates, only Miami has had any experience with non-Democrats hands.

A study by United Way, “Struggling to Get By,” takes a hard look at how progressive policies have fared in California.  Among the key findings:

“One in three California families lacks income adequate to meet their basic needs.  One in three California households (31%) do not have sufficient income to meet their basic costs of living. This is nearly three times the number officially considered poor according to the Federal Poverty Level. Families falling below the Real Cost Measure reflect California’s diversity. One in five (20%) struggling households are white, so while poverty is often portrayed in our media and culture as primarily a problem for minorities, the reality is that families of all ethnicities struggle.”

By contrast, notes the American Legislative Exchange Council, (ALEC) “States that have adopted pro-growth policies have generally witnessed their economies grow, offering greater wage growth and more opportunities for citizens. Yet, despite years of empirical evidence supporting free market policies, some states choose a different path. …

“The empirical evidence and analysis … makes clear which policies lead to greater levels of opportunity and which policies are obstacles to growth. … This … concludes that pro-growth tax policy, that avoids picking winners and losers, provides a fair and competitive environment for all hardworking taxpayers. There are many policy obstacles that lawmakers face when trying to create a competitive economic environment… tools include lowering or eliminating the corporate and personal income taxes, reducing overall tax burdens, reducing or eliminating state death taxes, simplifying tax codes and supporting worker freedom. State policymakers [must] fix their budgets and address long-term pension liabilities.

“Generally, [ALEC’s latest] rankings show that [free market-oriented states]Utah, Wyoming, North Carolina, Florida and Texas are economic hotspots for growth. Furthermore, many of the no income tax states such as Nevada and South Dakota are also economically promising. On the other hand, most states in the Northeast and some states in the Rust Belt are facing economic decline. In the Rust Belt, Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin deserve major credit for positive pro-growth reforms they have recently enacted after decades of poor policy choices. Additionally, Minnesota and Illinois both face significant fiscal challenges. the Northeast are even worse.”

Internationally, socialism has harmed the prosperity of the nations and peoples who have adopted it. The Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEE) notes: “Socialism is the Big Lie of the twentieth century. While it promised prosperity, equality, and security, it delivered poverty, misery, and tyranny. Equality was achieved only in the sense that everyone was equal in his or her misery.”

The latest example is Greece. Jake Novak, writing for CNBC  eports “while Greece’s epic debt problems have dominated the news, I haven’t heard very much about who is to blame for what’s happened in that country. When any bank or other capitalist entity fails, the news media and the general public seem to name their favorite specific villains almost instantly. The word “profit” becomes dirty somehow and public figures start pining away for a more giving society that never was. But where is the condemnation of socialism and the failed politicians who peddled a proven failure of a system not only to the Greeks but to the half billion people who live in the E.U.? Where is the recognition that when the Greeks recently elected an even more leftist and socialist government, it sped up the path to collapse?”

The problems are not limited to the Old World.  In contrast to the largely capitalist USA, Latin America economies have been far more government-centered. Despite the inherent wealth of resources, many nations in Latin America fail to prosper. Daniel Wagner and CJ Post, writing in Huffington point out that “Even when times have been good, Latin America’s socialist countries have still failed to deliver meaningful political and economic reforms or effective public spending programs.”

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America’s Great Divide

Two completely different philosophies of government are dividing the U.S. population. More serious than any mere difference over a single issue, the chasm represents wholly divergent views on the rights of individuals and the powers of federal, state and local authorities.

Since the dawn of the American Republic, there has been a fairly consistent understanding of what government is supposed to do. Washington handles foreign relations, protects the nation from enemies abroad, settles disputes between the states, protects the liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights (and later amendments), administers federal courts, patrols the borders, delivers the mail, opens up new frontiers and provides major interstate transportation infrastructure. States and localities are tasked with protecting residents from crime, maintaining sanitary and safety conditions, providing local transportation, educating the young, and providing a legal system to peacefully settling local disputes.

There have been relatively moderate additions to those duties. Programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid gave the government more direct interaction with individuals. States and cities provided financial and other assistance to those in need. But the guiding principles of the ninth and tenth Amendments within the Bill of Rights remained intact:

Ninth Amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Tenth Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In the view of progressives, however, the 9th and 10th Amendment limitations on government’s rights and duties are anachronisms to be largely ignored, as are the separation of powers and the distinction between the federal government’s role and that of more local jurisdictions.

Progressives choose to de-emphasize traditional duties and limitations on government, and replace them with different responsibilities. They advocate reduced funding for defense on the national level and crime fighting on the local level and shifting those dollars to what have been called “nanny state” priorities.

Some of those new priorities have been the subject of ridicule. While mayor of NYC, Michael Bloomberg cut the size of the police department, and advocated cutting the size of the fire department. He focused on regulating what size soda could be purchased, and the salt intake of his constituents.

Others have created extraordinary controversy. The use of the Common Core curriculum to enhance federal oversight of education and politicize curriculum has been contentious. Federal interference into what was once a local responsibility extends even to what food items may be placed on school menus.

The most controversial, of course, was the enactment of Obamacare. While its progressive advocates likened it to programs such as social security, its opponents noted that its lengthy list of bureaucratic interactions with the patient-physician relationship render it an extraordinary and inappropriate increase in federal power.

Paul Joseph Warson, writing for Infowars in 2012   stated that “The nanny state is no longer just on steroids, it has turned into the Incredible Hulk as collectivism, pernicious bureaucracy, regulation, mass surveillance and outright tyranny runs wild across the country.”

He provided a number of examples. Among them:

– Parents across the country are being arrested for letting their children play outside.

–a man was found guilty and sentenced to spend 30 days in jail for collecting rainwater in three “illegal reservoirs” despite the fact that they are on his property.
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– Last year, a Michigan resident faced jail time for the crime of growing a “vegetable garden in front yard space.”

– Americans are being harassed by utility workers who are trespassing on private property and forcibly trying to install “smart” energy meters which spy on homeowners.

– Cities are passing ordinances that makes recycling compulsory

– The TSA has expanded its grope-down checkpoints beyond the airports to highways, political events and even school prom nights.

– The TSA is kicking Americans off flights for having a “bad attitude” and refusing to obey bizarre orders quickly enough.

– A teenager was recently visited by FBI special agents who grilled him over the content of a political You Tube video.

– The EPA is using spy drones to monitor farms as police use Predator drones to hunt down Americans for the crime of allowing cows to wander onto their land.

– Students in schools across the country are being indoctrinated to accept their treatment as prisoners on parole by being forced to wear RFID tracking chips.

– Veterans across the country are being declared “mentally defective” on a whim by the state and having their firearms seized.

– The federal government is officially backing Al-Qaeda fighters in Syria while declaring conservative Americans to be extremists and terrorists if they are “reverent of individual liberty.”

The dramatic increase in the size of existing programs is also indicative of the shift in governmental emphasis from basic services to a social-welfare nanny state. The Fiscal Times has noted that “everyone is aware of SNAP (food stamps), the mother of all food handouts, where over 47.8 million people participate at an annual cost of $81 billion. But awareness of the sprawling array of other government food programs is another eye opener. WIC, for example, the Women, Infants and Children Food and Nutrition Service, started small in 1968 to help poor and undernourished mothers-to-be. It now covers 53 percent of all infants in America at an annual cost of $8.8 billion, and involves 90 state agencies, 1,836 bureaus and 9,000 clinics. This now staggering project is a gateway to many other government-funded entitlement programs, including SNAP. There are, of course, lots of rules and the catalogue of approved foods is mind-boggling. Under WIC, mothers to be can’t buy white potatoes (insufficiently nutritious), imported cheeses or cheese spreads and only 9 types of domestic cheeses are approved. Canned beans are fine, but not if they include pork or frankfurters. Moms may buy a gallon of milk, but only in gallon containers, not two half-gallons.

“The spread of free school lunches—and now free breakfasts– is another story. In 1969, some 2.9 million youngsters received free lunches daily. By 2012, there were 18.7 million free lunches, 68.2 percent of all school lunches. What about free food during summer? No problem thanks to the Seamless Summer Option. Now ALL children can eat free in communities where 50 percent of all children are eligible for free or reduced-cost meals—that’s about two-thirds of all schools with lunch programs. In large part, the 50 percent of lunches that go to apparently ineligible youngsters are given to avoid stigmatizing the eligible.”

The list of individual examples could go on and on. But the key point is the significant growth in the powers of government in untraditional and unconstitutional areas, and the neglect of more appropriate responsibilities.  All this has occurred without any attempt to truly involve the American people in any meaningful discussion or debate.

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“Social Justice” and the Social Contract

In Ferguson, Missouri, martial law has been declared in the wake of unrest following the shooting death of a black male by a white police officer. The person shot has been implicated in a recent robbery. Before any of the facts could be ascertained, rioting ensued and racial arsonists from across the nation descended on the town.

The battle cry of those who seek to politically gain from incidents such as this is “No Justice, No Peace.” Those chanting it don’t want justice via the rule of law to prevail.  It has come to mean a demand for instantaneous, preconceived punishment, regardless of the facts and the truth as determined by law enforcement, Judges and juries.

We are seeing this now in Ferguson, where the Governor has declared martial law, and to a lesser extent recently in Staten Island, New York, where an individual died following an apparently resisted arrest.  In each instance the individuals died after encounters with a white cop.  Both of the deceased were breaking the law albeit in minor ways.

That these two ended up dead is a tragedy.  That both situations were seized upon by racial arsonists and criminals determined to exploit the racial anger and chaos are also tragedies. Individuals such as Al Sharpton have made a career out of exploiting racial tensions.

These agitators for personal gain ignore black on black crime in places like NYC and Chicago and wait in the tree line for “unequal power” events which end with the death of a black “victim,” as defined by them.

“Victimhood,” with all its waivers for personal responsibility, actions and behavior is what people like Al Sharpton sell like a drug.
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The politics of “victimhood” has resulted in double standards throughout American life and the predictable and resultant fraying of the social contract.  “Victimhood” has also been grafted onto certain groups thereby resulting in knee jerk reactions when bad things happen.

America is a nation of laws that protect individual rights.  No person and no group is supposed to be exempt.  Yet that is exactly what far too many of those who exploit “victims” who break the law want.  Non designated victims don’t have a prayer of getting public sympathy for this position because the prevailing progressive ethos does not allow that to happen.

“Victimhood” must be retained only for those who can be used to help bring down the “system” as extreme leftists Cloward and Piven would have it.  So it is reserved for blacks, Muslims, gays, illegals and others extremists wish to characterize as outside the mainstream.  Those they can’t portray as outsiders just don’t count.  Those promoting “victimhood” want chaos because chaos obliterates the social contract and leaves them in charge.

Ferguson, Missouri is currently ground zero for “Social Justice” where first amendment rights and law and order are being attacked in pursuit of Saul Alinsky’s dream of overthrowing an America ruled by laws respecting individual rights.

Ferguson, Missouri  is also social justice progressivism at its finest or at its worst depending on from which side you are viewing it.  It is where this President who was supposed to end racial strife and his allies has taken us in their fundamental transformation of America. Ironically, because this White House has been so eager to add fuel to the fire of racial tensions, Al Sharpton is really not needed anymore.

This article was written by Larry Allison.