On Fox Business’ Freedom Watch last week I sat down with Democratic strategist and former Chuck Schumer aide Christopher Hahn to discuss the “ Durbin amendment” to the Dodd-Frank Bill.  If you are unfamiliar with the attachment to the bill, you may nonetheless be feeling the effects soon enough in the form of higher banking fees from checking account maintenance to debit card usage.

What the amendment (that went into effect on October 1st) does is place a cap on per-transaction “swipe fees” that banks charge retailers when purchases are made via debit cards.  They used to charge retailers roughly 44 cents per transaction.  Dodd-Frank limits this to 21 cents.  Since these fees are absorbed by the retailers, it doesn’t take a Wharton Business School degree to see that the immediate beneficiaries of this government intrusion into the private sector are the so-called big-box, high-volume retailers such as Walmart, Walgreens, Home Depot, Target, and others.

Mr. Hahn may have offered the weak Democratic operative/apologist defense of the bill in that Durbin was just doing what Senators do by helping his constituents, but I made it a point to remind him that the populist senator’s constituents in this case are not the consumers in his state but rather Big Retail.  The last time I checked, many retail titans are far wealthier than most Wall Street “fat cats” already.  The Walton family’s combined wealth far outstrips Warren Buffett’s (or Bill Gates’, for that matter), making them the de facto richest family in the world.  They are about to get a little wealthier as Walmart reaps its share of this estimated $7 billion annual windfall the Durbin amendment shifts from the banking to the retail sector. (more…)

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me.… Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful—that’s what matters to me.”

R.I.P Steve Jobs. He was the patron saint of entrepreneurs. Newton once reflected that if his vision extended farther than others’ it was because he stood upon the shoulders of giants. One of the giants has left this iWorld a much more interesting place.

Others will write volumes on this incredible man’s achievements.  I do not possess the eloquence to encapsulate so amazing a life nor his impact on the way we live today and will in the future.  All I can say from a personal standpoint is that Steve Jobs, through Apple and Pixar, represented to me what possibilities exist in this great country when brilliance, vision, chutzpah and a whole lot of confidence in one’s own assessment of what the public desires combine into one formidable force.  (Oh, and as the Occupy Wall Street mob might want to remember as they tweet on their Apple, Inc. iPhones and iBooks, Jobs’ start-up also demonstrates how vital unfettered investment capital from the private sector is to finance said vision—in this case, $250,000 in1977 dollars from Mike Markkula, whom I imagine today would be classified by these same protestors as an “evil millionaire”.)

As the days pass the pantheon of memories of Mr. Jobs’ legacy will also include, rightfully, some failures as well as his many undeniable successes.  Eli Lehrer at the Heartland Institute points out a few: The Apple III was bug-infested.  The Lisa was prohibitively expensive.  The Apple G4 Cube sold poorly and he never made a mark in the applications software arena.

Still, as any creative person knows, and certainly those in business will tell you,  the road to ultimate success is often paved by initial failures, so long as they are viewed for what they are: a treasure trove of valuable lessons.

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On BigHollywood I once shared my thoughts on the movie Glory and how Col. Robert Gould Shaw, commander of the 54^th Mass., was an example of a post-racial man in his day – indeed he went to his death for his belief in the rights of the free Black men under his command with whom he shared a common grave.

One of my favorite characters in this film was Sergeant-Major Rawlins, played by the esteemed actor Morgan Freeman.  Rawlins, a grave-digger before enlisting in the Union army, is presented as an older, wiser and honest man whom the others look up to…and Shaw himself leans on for counsel.  Perhaps the best scene in the film is the altercation between Rawlins and the embittered and recalcitrant Private Silas Tripp (Denzel Washington).  Rawlins berates Tripp harshly after Tripp derides his compliance with the chain of command, in which only Whites were allowed to be officers, as making him a “…n****r…nothing but the White man’s dog.”  Rawlins then bitch-slaps Tripp across the face and stings him with these words of wisdom and caution:

“And what are you? So full of hate you just want to go out and fight everybody.  Because you’ve  been whipped and chased by hounds.  Well that may not be living but it sure as hell ain’t dying.  And dying’s what these white boys been doing for going on three years now.  Dying by the thousands.  Dyin’ for you, fool!  I know ‘cause I dug the graves. And all the time I’m digging I’m asking myself when, oh Lord, when’s it gonna be our time?  Well our time’s comin’ when we gonna have to ante up.  Ante up and kick in like men…like men!  So you watch who you call a n****r.  If there’s any n****rs around here it’s you.  A smart mouth, stupid-ass, swamp-running n****r.  And if you ain’t careful that’s all you ever gonna be!”

What I like(d) about Morgan Freeman besides his acting is that, until recently, I felt this Rawlins mentality was not far from that of the actor who portrayed him.  Rawlins was a man who, though clearly the victim of racism himself, would not allow race to be an excuse for failure.  And thus I thought Freeman to be a post-racial man and disparaging of those who view the world through the prism of color.

Consider this excerpt from a 2005 interview with Mike Wallace when the actor exposes the hypocrisy of the 60 Minutes journalist for his condescending attitude towards Blacks that is so common among the white-guilt ridden liberal elite…even as they remain oblivious to their own racism that is just as pernicious if not more so than that of a klansman because of its very subtly.  Mike Wallace asked Freeman his thoughts on so-called Black History Month:

Freeman: “Ridiculous.”

Wallace: “Why?”

Freeman: “You’re gonna relegate my history to a month?”

Wallace: “Oh come on—”

Freeman: “What do you do with yours?  What month is ‘white history month’?”

Wallace: [Uncomfortable hemming and hawing.] “Well…”

Freeman: “No, come on.”

Wallace: [Uncomfortable noises. Waves away notion with sweep of hand] “I’m Jewish.”

Freeman: “Okay.  Which month is ‘Jewish history month’?”

Wallace: “There isn’t one.”

Freeman: “Oh…Oh…why not?  Do you want one?”

Wallace: [rather emphatic] “No, no, no I don’t—”

Freeman: “Alright.  I don’t either.  I don’t want a ‘Black history month.’  Black history is American history.”

Wallace: “How are we going to get rid of racism until—”

Freeman: “Stop talking about it.  I’m gonna stop calling you a ‘white man.’  And I’m gonna ask you to stop calling me a ‘black man.’  I know you as Mike Wallace and you know me as Morgan Freeman.  I’m not gonna say ‘I know this white guy named Mike Wallace.’ You know what I’m saying?”

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A Parable If You Will…

A friend of mine has a sister who has been broke for years.   Ten years ago he could no longer watch her struggle while his own career took off and he began supporting her by supplementing her small income with his own money.  He makes $300,000 a year and gives her $30,000 a year to help her out…roughly 20% of his take-home after all of his taxes (federal, state, local) are taken out of his paycheck.

Now, in those ten years of supporting her, she has not used that money as a foundation to build herself a better more independent life contructed on sound financial footing.  If anything, her situation now is even worse than it was a decade ago because she continues to make bad  decisions again and again.  She married an alcoholic husband (despite warnings from her family this was the case) and she then had a child with that same husband who is now of course estranged, voluntarily putting exponentially more strain on her already stressful life.  As of now, despite my friend having willingly given her all in $300,000 over ten years – money he could have put towards his kid’s college education, paying off his mortgage, or just socked away in the bank for a rainy day – she is no better off because the way she is running her affairs is still a disaster.  She hasn’t learned a thing.

Still, he continues to pay her because he believes it is his moral obligation to give back to those in need, especially as he has done so well in life.  He’s not thrilled about it, but he gets the concept and bucks up.  Plus he genuinely cares for the down-trodden, realizing that a few bad decisions in his own life, a wrong fork in the road taken, and he could have been there with her…still could be even.  He made need help himself someday.  Who knows what the future holds?

Now, the other day she came to him for her annual $30,000.  But this time, because of  new credit card debts accumulated, she asked him for $35,000.  Her logic?  He can afford it and she needs it.
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Those listening to President Obama’s speech in the Rose Garden yesterday may have been hoping for remarks outlining a comprehensive debt reducing package from the nation’s chief executive, but what they got was yet another class warfare screed.  Replete with admonitions that the wealthy need to pay their “fair share” (as defined by Him of course) and sprinkled with his patented scare tactics rooted in the fallacy of the false alternative (either hedge fund managers pay more or seniors will go hungry) the president to me revealed more of himself even than he has in the past about what really makes him tick, both philosophically as psychologically.

He is, at heart, an ardent believer that the wealth of a nation’s citizenry is in the end the property of their government into which the haves pay and bureaucrats then distribute out as social justice in the form or largess to the have-nots.  His increasing vibe of anger, that seems to conversely rise as his poll numbers fall, reveals to me a rather petulant man, unable to grasp the notion that he may not actually be the smartest guy in the room (despite the assurances of his orbiting satellites of sycophants in and out of  the MSM media) and that there are those who disagree with him not because they haven’t heard his message, but rather because they have and have found it wanting.

I found myself listening to his speech and thinking that I’d heard most of it before.  Most but not all.  One new tact that the historian in me found fascinating, and quite cynical, was his reaching down into the soil of Mount Vernon to summon the ghost of our most esteemed first president, George Washington, to help make his case.  Mr. Obama offered up this snippet from Washington’s September 19, 1796 Farwell Address to the nation to bolster his tax raising stance:

“…towards the payment of debts there must be revenue; that to have revenue there must be taxes; and no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant.”

Here is how Mr. Obama’s speech-writers interpreted our first president’s advice,   Said our current president:

“It’s always more popular to promise the moon and leave the bill for after the next election or the election after that.  That’s been true since our founding.  George Washington grappled with this problem.  He understood that dealing with the debt is — these are his words – ‘always a choice of difficulties.’  But he also knew that public servants weren’t elected to do what was easy; they weren’t elected to do what was politically advantageous.”

I wonder if anyone in the Obama administration studied history because to reach back to Washington to support, in effect, raising already burdensome income taxes to sustain a massive federal bureaucracy and social welfare state is about as far a reach as one can stretch before toppling over into the abyss of utter nonsense.

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Am I the only one who grew quite tired of seeing John Kerry this weekend on the MSM talk show circuit deriding the Tea Party and what he is proffering as their responsibility for the S&P action Friday?  “This is without a doubt a Tea Party downgrade,” he fumed on Meet The Press. The common narrative being offered by Mr. Kerry et. al. is that the right-wing GOP held the prospect of not raising the debt ceiling—thus forcing a default—like a gun to the head of a hostage government.  They then defiantly maintained their ideological rigidity by rejecting any revenue increases as part of the debt compromise.  Faced with the Scylla of spending cuts with no  tax hike but the necessary debt ceiling increase, or the Charybdis of a default and potential ruin, the Democrats caved and the GOP won a pyrrhic victory while irresponsibly selling the nation’s future down the river to inevitable downgrade.

To all of the 63,239,109 citizens who voted against Kerry’s bid to be president in 2004, I thank you.  One weekend of this man was bad enough.  Only one driven by blind partisanship could blame the Tea Party for a downgrade that was, as economics professor Steve Horowitz rightly pointed out: “50 to 75 years in the making.  Us spending beyond our means, trying to do things we simply can’t do, and not having the revenues to support that spending. Spending that just shouldn’t be there in the first place.”  Indeed, the moment the New Deal kicked in, the clock started ticking.  S&P’s message was clear.  Welfare statism, the kind of pay-as-you go ponzi schemes masked as social safety nets that John Kerry pines for, is a fool’s bargain.  Ask Europe.

How dare Kerry deride representatives for following through with their commitments to their electorate?  The sweep of the House for the GOP in 2010 was as clear a mandate as can be offered by the American public that the reckless spending had to stop—a mandate to which the Tea Party representatives especially remained faithful.  They were sent to Washington to stop the out-of-control spending bus cold.  The entrenched interests like Kerry wanted the bus to continue heading off the cliff at 60 mph.  Yet, because the Tea Partiers did not want to “compromise” and slow the bus down to 30 mph they were labeled “extremists.”  They understand what Europe is learning.  The nanny state experiment that has lasted for a mere three generations is already collapsing under the weight of mathematics as so cleverly encapsulated in Margaret Thatcher’s famous quote…“you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

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President Obama this Tuesday stated his case for increased taxes on “the rich” as part of his solution to balance the deficit. “Keep in mind,” he assured the American people, “that under a balanced approach, the 98% of Americans who make under $250,000 would see no tax increases at all.”

I have a very basic question that I am not sure anyone has pressed Mr. Obama to answer: Where did this figure of 250k, north of which one is considered by him to be among “the rich” even come from?  Its very roundness tells me that it was the result not of a detailed actuarial analysis but rather some sort of arbitrary caprice that only those completely isolated from any private sector experience can conjure up.  I almost get the feeling it was something as off-hand as: “Hey 250k sounds right to me.  Nice number.  So whattya think?”  Sure write it in there.

Consider: if you are living in Little Rock, Arkansas  and make $249,000 according to the president you are not “rich” and thus do not need to kick in more.  Yet if you live in, say, New York City and make $251,000 you are “rich” and so it’s time to ante up.  Is that how it works?  Again I ask:  what is so magical about $250,000?  Why is the cut-off  not $246,500 or $310,231?  Isn’t anyone curious about how this man creates economic policy?

Let’s look at it this way.  Someone in the New York metro area making $251,000 need only make $100,000  to garner the same standard of living in Little Rock, Arkansas.  For instance, a family of four searching for a two-bedroom apartment  in Manhattan can expect to pay anywhere from the low end of $2,100/mo in Harlem to $6,700/mo+ in Tribeca.  (That of course makes the two kiddies double up in one room).  In Little Rock you can find a comparable apartment for an average of $700/mo.  New York’s low end is three times Little Rock’s average.     (This standard of living discrpency, in fact, serves as an indictment of the unfairness of our entire messed up tax code but I digress.)

So again I ask where does this $250,000 level come from?

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The recent correction in the commodities markets may be providing Bernake, Geithner and their easy money acolytes with a sense of relief given the relentless run up in prices of raw materials since the announcement of QE back in 2008, but they should not sleep tight just yet.  As anyone in the markets will tell you, when any underlying commodity has a price move so vertical in its trajectory it’s bound to face a correction as the smart money, having gotten in for fundamental reasons much earlier along the trend line now wait for the panic buyers or the Johnny-come-lately’s to give the rally that last unsustainable spike to unload their longs and leave the suckers holding $40.00 silver in their purses.

So one must step back and take a long view.  Although it would appear that those of us who warn that inflation is not just a threat but very much a fact of life now were knee-jerk pontificators jumping on the commodities rally trend for political (read: Fed/Obama bashing) reasons, the analysis is quite sound.  Most important, it is methodical not emotional as price surges tend to make investors and analysts from time to time.

Here are some facts: even with the inevitable correction in commodities, as of this writing crude oil is 35% more expensive than it was a year ago…advancing with ups and downs along the way from as low as $17.50/bbl in November of 2001 to its current level of over $100/bbl or around a 19% annual appreciation in a decade since the Fed started giving away dollars.  In that same year silver is still up 93%   Wheat 84%. Cotton 100%  Coffee 55%. Cattle 10%, etc.  In that same decade the USD index against all currencies shed 40% of its value.  Gold is up 22% for the year.  More revealing, the most precious metal and most stable of exchange mechanisms is up an astonishing 450% since 2001. Put another way, whereas the dollar was worth 1/250^th of an ounce of gold in 2001, it is now only worth 1/1500^th.  Money can be printed with much more ease and speed than gold can be mined.

To understand why the Bernake’s and Geithner’s of the world view CPI through rose-tinted glasses we must remember who they are.  They are wonks who have spent their entire careers lecturing and/or fidgeting with economies without actively participating in them.  They are awash in data and are hardwired to extrapolate patterns from the past to predict the future.  But we have only had a non-gold fiat monetary system in place since 1971 which is hardly enough time to get a handle on repeating macro-economic cycles in such an ever changing and dynamic landscape.  And I want to offer something else.  From the late 1940s to the mid-1980s the United States was the dominant manufacturer in the world.  The reason?  Of our three main foreign competitors today, China, Japan and Germany, one was mired for much of the third quarter of the 20^th Century in a disastrous experiment with Maoist communism while the latter two’s urban centers had been reduced to utter wasteland as their reward for launching the most devastating war in human history.  Indeed, all of Europe was digging out of the wreckage of their mass-fratricide, including a bankrupted Great Britain…once the supreme power of the world.

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Ah, April 15th! I want you to consider that the date means absolutely nothing to 47% of US households as they will pay zero in federal income tax. Yes, state, property and sin taxes still get them, but we are seeing a disturbing trend towards a tipping point where fewer than half of us pay any sort of income tax. Five years ago it was 40% who paid no income tax. By 2012 this could be the first election in which the majority of voters will be able to vote themselves more government largess paid for by a minority of taxpayers. We may soon have to re-jigger the American Revolution’s familiar rallying cry into: “Representation Without Taxation!”

Statistics vary slightly but it can be argued that the top five percent of US households pay 60% of federal income tax. Ten percent account for over 75%. Another two-fifths make up the rest. And half are exempt. And yet…twenty percent of US households get 75% of their income from the federal government. Another one-fifth receives 40% of their financial support from Uncle Sam. Think about what this means in terms of fiscal responsibility down the road. How receptive to cutting taxes which they do not pay, or cutting government spending, from which they benefit, is a majority voting block going to be in the future? Indeed, what does this say about our prospects for economic growth or curbing the size and scope of an ever growing government colossus in the face of a crushing $20 trillion deficit looming on the horizon?

Very soon we may not be merely de-incentivizing economic activity but actively waging war on it.

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The anti-government “throw-the-bums-out” crowds have had their chance to speak out on how to curtail the deficit and what to do with those hated entitlements that are the antithesis of the America they pine for. A recent WSJ/NBC News poll provided a glimpse of just how dependent on big government entitlements Americans have become–even among the Tea Party. Not that this should be a surprise to anyone watching the slow shift of the American mindset from citizen, to consumer, to ward of the State over the past century.

According to the Wall Street Journal who co-sponsored the poll, “Americans across all age groups and ideologies said by large margins that it was ‘unacceptable’ to make significant cuts in entitlement programs in order to reduce the federal deficit.”

No wonder President Obama in his State of the Union speech only paid lip service to Social Security and Medicare reform, mentioning each by name only once in over 7,000 words of text. He knows what Americans are really about as summed up in the old adage: “It all depends on whose ox is being gored.”

And the poll exposes a potentially discrediting hypocrisy within the Tea Party movement who claim to be for smaller government and a return to a libertarian Nirvana. Consider: by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, self-described Tea Partiers declared significant cuts to Social Security “unacceptable.”

In fact, as the poll reveals, less than a quarter of Americans support making significant cuts to Social Security or Medicare to tackle the mounting deficit about which they cry warnings of impending doom.

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Sometimes I wonder why the Republicans wanted to win in 2010 so badly.  I hope it wasn’t in a quest for job security because if they’re really serious about putting the country’s fiscal house in order they are not going to have a happy electorate come 2012…Tea Party small-government rhetoric notwithstanding.

Sure, the majority of Americans claim to be for reducing the size of the state to get our fiscal house in order, but do they really understand just how drastic an impact reverting back to a more laissez-faire market-oriented national model would have on their lives?  Certainly, if the transcript of the SOTUS I skimmed through yesterday is any indication – and, most revealing, where the applause breaks are noted – I think we have a way to go yet.

Consider:  One out of six Americans now receives some form of government assistance.  [U.S.A Today.]  Fifty million are on Medicaid, a record high.  Food stamp enrollment now stands at 40 million, or one in seven people. Ten million Americans receive unemployment benefits, and 4.4 million get direct cash assistance.  And these numbers are from only four of the more than seventy welfare programs funded by the federal government!  These figures are not anomalies caused by a recession, but a reflection of the trend towards an entitlement culture that has been growing steadily since the 1960s “Great Society” pipe dream.

This is a recipe for doom yet no politician, from the President on down, Democran or Republicrat alike, will ever muster the courage to address the meat and potatoes of our spending suicide…so they will whip up ire aimed at the parsley garnish like private jets and federal salaries instead.  So a tipping point is at hand.  Almost 50% of Americans pay no income tax, yet so many in this country suckle up to the government teat in one form or another courtesy of the American taxpayer that I see no possibility of this entrenched political system of careerists doing a necessary ‘reset’ to bring us back to a sustainable, market-driven model.  Rather it will be the eventual verdict of raw and unfeeling mathematics that imposes what we refuse to do voluntarily in the form of defaults, declining and eventually disappearing government services, and reduced if not eliminated entitlement benefits.

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On a recent pilgrimage to Gettysburg I ventured into the Evergreen cemetery, the scene of chaotic and bloody fighting throughout the engagement. Like Abraham Lincoln on a cold November day in 1863, I pondered the meaning of it all.  With the post-Tea Party wave of libertarianism sweeping the nation, Lincoln’s reputation has received a serious pillorying. He has even been labeled a tyrant, who used the issue of slavery as a mendacious faux excuse to pummel the South into submitting to the will of the growing federal power in Washington D.C. In fact, some insist, the labeling of slavery as the casus belli of the Civil War is simply a great lie perpetrated by our educational system.

First of all, was Lincoln in fact a tyrant?  For me the root of such a characterization centers on the man’s motivations. A man of international vision that belied his homespun image, Lincoln saw the growing power of an industrialized Europe and realized that a divided America would be a vulnerable one. “The central idea of secession,” he argued, “is anarchy.” Hence, maintaining the Union was his prime motivation, not the amassing of self-serving power.

It is true that Lincoln unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus. From a Constitutional standpoint, the power of the federal government to suspend habeas corpus “in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety” is clearly spelled out in Article 1, Section IX. And an insurrection of eleven states would certainly qualify as such. Whether or not Lincoln had the authority (Article I pertains to Congress) most significant to me is that the Constitution does allow for the suspension of habeas corpus in times of severe crisis. So, doesn’t the question distill down to a more wonkish matter of legal procedure, rather than the sublime notion of denying the rights of man?

Constitutional minutia aside, the question remains whether or not Lincoln’s actions made him a tyrant. Consider the country in 1861-1862, the years in which the writ was suspended, re-instituted and then suspended again until war’s end.  The war was not going well for the North, and Southern sympathies were strong in the border states and the lower Midwestern counties. The federal city was surrounded by an openly hostile Virginia on one side and a strongly secessionist Maryland on the other. “Copperhead” politicians actively sought office and could only sow further seeds of discord if elected. Considering these factors, one wonders what other course of action Lincoln could have taken to stabilize the situation in order to successfully prosecute the war. “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts,” he asked, “while I may not touch a hair on the head of the wily agitator who induces him to desert?”

It seems that one’s appreciation for Lincoln’s place in history is largely an off-shoot of one’s position on the rebellion itself.

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Imagine a fine autumn day on the great plains of Illinois.  The sun smiles down through the azure dome of the Midwestern sky upon 75,000 fans crowded into the University of Illinois Memorial Stadium.  A sea of orange and blue shimmers in the stands and the roar “I-L-L!…I-N-I! echoes over the field while pennants swirl and snap in the breeze above the crowd.

It’s halftime during another glorious Big Ten football Saturday in Urbana-Champaign and a celebrated ritual dating back to 1926 begins again.    The Marching Illini band parts with military precision, clearing a path for a lone figure who emerges and struts proudly to the center of the field.  He is barefoot, clad in buckskin and leather tassels, his face painted bright orange and blue, and his head is topped by an impressive mien of eagle feathers.

Chief Illiniwek bows to the throng of admirers then he dances to Native American music.  He skims across the field as he twists and turns. He suddenly leaps in the air, touches his toes in an aerial split and then lands feet together on the turf.  He stands, arms folded in front of him in an ancient pose, as the band belts out the Illinois Fight song “Oske-wow-wow.” There is no mocking here.  No disrespect for the Native Americans whose namesake we at the U of I adopted as our own.

But that scene is just a fading memory now for the Chief is no more.  In fact this college football season marks the sixth year of his banishment from our campus by the NCAA for being a mascot “hostile and abusive” to Native American sensibilities.  (Although his last official performance would not take place until February 2007 at a home basketball game).

How did this come to pass?

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I propose a plan that I am confident will save roughly 40,000 American lives (that’s about one Korean War) each and every year and prevent many times more from being injured or maimed.  We have it in our power to  finally put an end to the steady slaughter of our fellow citizens–and it will not further intrude upon our civil liberties one iota.

What’s the plan?  Lower the national speed limit to a maximum of 15 miles per hour. (This is still faster than the average horse at an extended trot, which we were content enough with for eons before the advent of speedier travel.)

Ludicrous?  Of course.  And in reality I certainly wouldn’t support it other than in jest here.  But think about what the speed limits say about how we selectively view  public safety as our ultimate criterion when adopting policies.   By allowing the speed limits to stay 55 and higher, we as a nation are really making a not so subtle statement that the convenience of going fast (and the profits and productivity this implies) comes with a price tag of 40,000 men women and children dead by car accident every year.  It is a price we are apparently willing to pay.  Thus do we indeed draw a line whereby the considerations of safety do take a back seat to other factors.  We do not therefore accept the clarion call of “it will save lives” as the blanket justification for all things.

And yet we are willing to sacrifice so much more than just convenience at the altar of safety where the TSA’s new draconian scanning/pat-down protocols  are concerned.  Will these procedures make air travel safer and thwart the occasional statistically insignificant act of terrorism in the skies.  I would think.  But is it worth the price?

I dunno.

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What drives an entrepreneur to start a business?  Is it solely about money?  Or is there something more?  I argue that often it is the  same creative drive that compels an artist to paint, a musician to compose, or a sculptor to look at a piece of rough marble and see an angel inside.  And those who understand the mind of the small business owner know why the proposed tax increase in 2011 will do more harm than good to the very people this economy needs most to create jobs.

On FBN’s Bulls & Bears recently Democratic strategist Jehmu Greene, the token liberal steak tossed into the wolf den of laissez faire commentators, uttered words to the effect that if we allow the Bush tax cuts to remain, the “rich” (I guess that’s me?) will not put the money into the economy but rather just squirrel it away “in their banks…It would not go into job creation or creating capital for small business.”

My first thought  was: “In my bank? Really?  How many businesses have you owned?” (To be fair she did co-found some internet venture called Urban Hang Suite which shuttered in 2003).  But then I reminded myself that, like Ms. Greene herself who has been in non-profit and/or government almost her entire career,  very few people in the  Obama administration, from the president on down, have ever started a business.  Thus they cannot understand what drives entrepreneurs to succeed.  They think it is just about take-home pay.

It’s said that small business owners work eighteen hour days for ourselves so we don’t have to work eight hours a day for someone else.  And often our income on a dollar/hour basis is less than the established firms we may have left to go on our own. Certainly this is generally true for those few scary years at the beginning when a myriad of mistakes are made and unanticipated events occur that prompt the principals to pay ourselves only after all other obligations have been met   So why do it?  Why take such risk?

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Al Sharpton is not happy with Glenn Beck.  On The O’Reilly Factor yesterday he took umbrage with Beck’s desire to “take back the Civil Rights movement.”  Now, as I see it there are several reasons a so-called Black Community leader like Sharpton could find that language offensive.

It could be that be Al believes that the Civil Rights movement – one in which Americans of all races, creeds and backgrounds came together to forge a new national character that elevated previously down-put groups to equal legal and social footing with the majority population as a whole – is the exclusive property of African-Americans.  He said so much during his counter-rally when he commented on the date being the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A  Dream” speech on the mall. “This is our day!” Sharpton bloviated.  “And we ain’t giving it away!”

I guess the idea that those on the mall this Saturday had no right to that day came as a surprise to Dr. Alveda King who is the niece of Dr. King and was a featured speaker at Beck’s rally.  It may have even come as surprise to the late MLK himself were he alive.  He was, after all,  the man who referred in his
speech to “All God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics…” coming together.  And isn’t that what made King’s speech so special?  That his was a message of inclusion.  Not an “us versus them” but a gigantic national ”we.”  King understood that the cancer of racism destroys the entire body (America), not just the organ (minorities) it specifically targets.  In comparison, Sharpton’s comments seemed so beneath the memory of King.  So petty.  So small as to make one shake his/her head and ask what happened to this most noble of movements that began when a woman on a bus refused to give up her seat to a white man so many years ago?

And this really gets to the heart of Sharpton’s problem with Beck’s incredibly successful gathering.

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I have a frequent nightmare:  In the year 2011, with the full support and complicity of their shadow ally, Russia, the Islamofacist regime in Tehran announces that they have developed a deliverable nuclear weapon(s).  That any attempt by any nation to dismantle their program through military force or draconian economic sanctions will be viewed as an overt act of war.  That they will view any such act of war as justification enough to deploy a nuclear weapon against Israel…regardless of what nation is behind the initial response.

They will cite classic anti-Semitic mantra, such as the myth that international Jewry controls the Western powers, etc. as their reasoning for labeling Israel the chief culprit by default.  More to the point, when push comes to shove they know that President Obama harbors no love of the Jewish state (as his harsh treatment of Netanyahu shows) and will have no stomach for a war to protect it.

[Meanwhile the Russians let it be known through diplomatic back-channels that relations between Tehran and Moscow have recently thawed and any retaliatory military strike against Iran for its actions against Israel could be viewed as an attack on Russia.]

The West, assuming it is even motivated to respond at all, is now put in a precarious position for a now-nuclear Iran looms over the Strait of Hormuz like a Colussus.   This narrow sea lane is by far the world’s most important oil chokepoint due to its daily flow of 16.5-17 million barrels, or roughly 40 percent of all seaborne oils (20 percent of oil traded worldwide).  At its narrowest point the channel is only 21 miles wide.

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June 25th is fast approaching and I hope this year, given the international tensions all around us, we pause and consider that it is not just another day but the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War.

When the 300,000 troops of the North Korean People’s Army supported by tanks and artillery violently smashed across the 38th parallel to invade and overrun most of the South, they unleashed a conflagration that would grow to be a three year bloodbath pitting the forces of Communism and the Western Democracies against each other for the first time.  (It would also be the first time that the nascent United Nations would commit military forces to halt the aggression of one nation against another, showing that the UN must be backed by military will to be effective.)  After initial see-saw fighting down to Pusan, then up to the Yalu River after the Inchon landings, and then back down again after the massive Chinese intervention, the fighting settled into a brutal stalemate along a line that eventually would mimic the original pre-war border.  When the fighting finally ended in July 1953, the war left in its wake four million military and civilian casualties, including 37,000 American dead and another 100,000 wounded.  South Korea’s army would suffer almost 1 million casualties, the other UN nations’ a combined 17,000 as well. An estimated 520,000 North Koreans and another 900,000 Chinese were casualties.

One of the wounded from that war was a young Second Lieutenant Jack Schaeffer from the 1st US Marine Division, my father.   In his more reflective moments, usually after a pint or three, he would tell me bits and pieces of what he saw and did there.  Needless to say, they were disturbing.  And the one thing I believe always went through his mind was this: was the sacrifice made by him and his fellow soldiers worth it?

The answer lies in the contrast between the two nations six decades later.  The tragic fact is that every day 23 million North Koreans are forced to endure an horrific existence in what can justifiably be classified a slave state.  I will not get into the nitty-gritty of the starvation, exposure, poor health conditions, the physical and mental abuse, the forced labor camps, and general privations these isolated people suffer as this has been well-documented.

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This past April, an undated photo of two slave children was found at a moving sale in Charlotte, North Carolina, accompanied by a document detailing the sale of  “John” for $1,150 in 1854.  (John is presumably one of the children).  The photo was purchased by collector Keya Morgan for $30,000.  As a father of a little boy, this photograph reaches out to me in a distinctly personal level for I cannot imagine ever being separated from my child and the unbearable anguish I would suffer having him literally sold out from under me and taken away never to be seen again…left always to wonder about the son I lost to the horrors that was American slavery.  The two forlorn children in this photo stare back at us through the chasm of time. They are the ghosts of an ugly national past.  The victims of a monstrous injustice that would take the violent deaths of 620,000 Americans to rectify.

Still, I am struck by the breathtakingly steep arc of moral ascendency we have seen in this great country since the horrible bloodlettings that occurred on the battlefields of Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania and over six thousand others to determine once and for all what kind of country we would become.

That we have gone from a nation in which three million fellow Americans were held as slaves literally in chains and shackles, with no more legal rights than a goat, to a country that elects a Black man to the highest and most powerful office in the land says much about who we are as a people.

There will be those on the left who will predictably use the upcoming Independence Day holiday to highlight the hypocrisy of the Declaration we celebrate.  They will mock the document of a slave state that had the brazenness to announce to the world our vision of a better nation founded in the conviction that such basic human rights as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness come not from governments or royals, but from a higher power than ourselves: Divine Providence.

But these cynics will miss the point.

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General strikes in Greece have brought much of the country to a halt as trade unions and government workers stage more protests over austerity measures.  A 24-hour work stoppage  last week closed much of the country’s public sector and shut down  ferries, trains and public transport.

So here  is one unfunded social utopia’s score card so far:  Three have died already this month in massive riots  in the streets of Athens which are in danger of re-erupting anew.  Paralyzing strikes from civil servants, so used to getting so much largess for doing so little for so long.   A  $145 billion bailout is in jeopardy with the big dogs of the EU, Germany chief among them, expressing serious concerns that the austerity measures demanded of Greece as a condition to merit the loans will ever come to fruition.  Given the revised deficit projections and a public that seems unwilling to admit that their free ride brand of socialism as expressed in a financially unsustainable pension structure is collapsing, who can blame Europe?

Greece is bankrupt.   Their debt is 108% of GDP and will climb to almost 150% by 2013 when the bailout loans would come due.  25% of Greek taxes will go to service its debt — to mostly foreign investors.  Currently that nation’s government spending amounts to 50% of its GDP.

Consider then that in 2009 US debt was 86% of GDP and climbing.  It will go past 100% by 2012.  20% of U.S. federal taxes go to service the interest on the national debt.  That number too will rise.  Our major social entitlement programs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, are bankrupt.  We are waging foreign wars almost entirely on our own—so that Europe doesn’t have to.  And now we have just enacted the mother of all entitlements in Obamacare  that only the most wishful of thinkers (or a cynical Democratic Congress and White House) would argue is anything but a multi-trillion dollar debt dog pile on top of an already strained budget.

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