Perhaps We Will Catch the Lil’ Piggy in 2014

Sigh…some Democrats now say that the Tea Party is Dead! Long live the King Democrats. Since housing peaked in 2005 and America woke up to a sonic boom of the air being popped out of our economic future, the election cycle has been a back and forth caldron of voting with the American middle attempting to catch our country’s politics that has somehow eluded us for the past four elections like a greased pig at a rodeo.

After each election, the Party faithful come out all braggadocio about their accomplishments and about how the other side is dead forevermore. Neither seems a bit interested in looking behind them at the vast middle of America who is wildly running about on the rodeo floor with outstretched arms attempting to corral the politics of extremism into a pen of collaboration and compromise.

We have attempted once more to brandish a flag of reason above the rooting snouts of our piggish Parties yet they will not look up toward the sky of ideas and ideals, favoring the pungent odors of power and selfish goals instead.

The Tea Party is no more dead than the Republicans or Democrats. Yet a country cannot be governed by a singular fiscal goal no matter its import. And the people will catch this little greased pig that just so happened to have dodged our grasp to the left this time after having scurried to the right in 2010. We will have our country prosper in spite of our political parties’ obsessions with the truffles of power that retards our progress. This little piggy went weeeeeee wweeeeee weeeeeee all the way to its dream that it has reached its promised land. Wake up little Piggy, wake up!

A Power Grab Must Offer A Real Jobs Plan Or Give Up More of the Pie

So the middle class guy was working through the eighties and nineties but was losing ground. Jobs were leaving but he at least got Walmart prices as a token. He lost his company pension, but at least he was given an IRA to save a bit more of his income for his own retirement. Somehow though as America’s wealthy got wealthier, his IRA crashed. No matter, because to compensate him for his loss, he was given what he knew was a crazy, low interest, no doc loan on a house with ballooning equity and plenty of credit cards to make ends meet. He hoped his ballooning investment would make up what was lost in the last two decades.

After a few years of bubble, just when it seemed he would recover, the wool that had been pulled over his eyes suddenly dropped, exposing the reality that he had no job, no retirement funds, no credit rating, and no housing equity, plus he was historically over his head in debt. He wondered what the heck had happened to the America he once knew.

In his moment of despair, Barack Obama appeared promising hope and change. Yet, two years later, his home was foreclosed and his unemployment payments had run out. Then the Tea Party marched over the hill to put America back on track so he joined them, hoping that his nightmare would end. Two more years went by and now he involuntarily joined the 99ers on food stamps as the representatives he voted for gridlocked.

So here we are in 2012 with Barack and Mitt having spent 6 bilion dollars telling him how they intend to end this three decade long chapter of malaise. He has listened intently hoping for answers to how they would fix the housing disaster plus give him a way to pay his debt and repair his credit through an immediate job. Both candidates gave their party centric messages, yet he won’t use their filters to decide his vote. Instead, he will try as he must to determine himself how their plans will help his immediate problems.

He will not vote as Republicans had hoped out of frustration from being out of work and out of funds with the slim chance that Mitt can create jobs with his ambiguous plan. The Republicans could have upped the ante with a better offer but they did not, choosing to let it ride on their initial strategy. Could they have presented a viable plan to quickly grow the economy through a direct jobs program? Yes, but they didn’t have a clear vision for how to get there.

Without a viable plan to grow the pie, the only way the Republicans could offer more was for their constituents to give a bigger piece of their pie to him and that was not in the cards. Barack, on the other hand, offered a slightly bigger share of the pie with his attack on raising the wealthy’s taxes, yet he really had no vision for an immediate fix to housing, debt, retirement funds, or jobs either.

Still, Democrats offered a social safety net until his situation improved and the Tea Party was threatening to cut that net. So he chose to stick with Barack. If Republicans want to take back the power in 2014 and beyond, they will either have to offer a real, viable, and understandable plan for immediate jobs that grows the pie for everyone, or they are going to have to up their ante by offering to share a bigger slice of the existing pie through socialism. By then the ante will have to be much bigger because jobs are slowly coming back.

Will America Hand the Election Back to Barack?

With about 60 hours to go before the votes are in for the President of the United States, a dread is coming over the Democrats as if some underlying deviousness will come from somewhere to steal the election away from where the polls are pointing. If Barack has such a lead in Ohio going into the election, will he not win? I have watched our nation flip-flop every two years lately like a stock market bubbling in a narrow range just waiting to break out one direction or another. Without a clear direction from either candidate, I see no reason why this simmering won’t continue.

Barack had his chance with the entire Congress to focus on JOBS and he wasted his bullets as far as the unemployed were concerned. Never mind that he actually got the ball rolling on the critical factor that is bankrupting our country, healthcare. Whether or not it was the right answer, it was an answer, and no Congress after Obamacare can return America to the stench that was our healthcare system before it. Hooray for the President for moving that mountain.

The Tea Party seemed a vibrant choice to focus on JOBS if Barack would not, even if their election mantra was on lowering the deficit. Given the chance to break out, they instead held the nation hostage over the debt ceiling and, more importantly, applied nefarious tactics to break the unions, including the teacher’s union.

America’s middle knows unions somehow are missing how their membership has not steered itself toward helping America right itself. We understood why attacks occurred on Unions in Wisconsin and Ohio. We just didn’t think the rationale and tactics smelled right. But kudos to the Tea Party for at least focusing the nation on such out of whack salaries and pensions. And no one can claim that America can ever return to a time when we simply accept such ridiculous Congressional spending without question after the last debt ceiling episode. So our hats are off in gratitude to the Tea Party. BUT where was their focus on JOBS?

So is it any wonder that Ohio apparently leans toward turning back toward the President, and that we may once again flip-flop back in this election. If this occurs with such an awful economy staring us in the face, with such abysmal ongoing Keynesian economics attempts by the Fed, and with the current administration’s lack of any real jobs ideas of substance, this is a “Big F…. deal” as my friend Joe Biden would say.

Mr. President, if Ohio hands you one more chance, BREAK OUT. Don’t allow America to simmer in disbelief that no Party cares for our economic blight. BE BOLD. Focus, for a little while at least, on the unemployed, who desperately need our country to recover. Fixing America for the unemployed will fix it for the employed and employers alike. Fixing America for the middle class, will fix America’s future for all classes.

Do not believe this current Western paradigm that structural unemployment is a necessity of Western economies. Focus on busting the international arbitrage that is spiraling us into structural unemployment. America can become competitive if our brand of capitalism realigns business with the American people. Look at my jobs program. You can find it on thrivingpath.com.

A hegemonic empire is a terrible thing to waste. If you get a second chance, don’t…

Don’t Spit Into the Wind That Blows from the Bowels of a Mighty American Empire

A fatal flaw of all democracies thus far has been that representative governments tend to spend for the vote ultimately to their ruin. Once entrenched in the final throes of this buying spree, the political system seems to overtake its participants, dragging them into an inflationary spiral that ends in a financial stall leaving their nation vulnerable to attacks from within and without. Of course for those elites of these participative governments, the financial consequences can be devastating.

The Koch brothers had no intention of seeing America’s governmental system implode from within and therefore set about to fund a movement that touched a central nerve within an existing party of that system to stop the bleeding of our republican form of participative government. After five years, this movement is in a position to begin to turn the tide if the tsunami of world financial events does not overtake it instead.

If the Tea Party is finally successful at reversing America’s spending spree before our dollar based government bursts upon itself, it will not be because the masses rose up and organized themselves. It will be because one of our financial elite was able to connect with the masses with a mutually self preserving idea strong enough to overcome the deadly inertia of a Republic gone mad clinging to its pocket book of a fiat currency.

The system that enables America’s spending spree is not contained within America nor will the devastation that ensues from our zealous spending obsession be contained within our shores. I am not ready to pass judgment just yet on whether the Tea Party and the Kochs will be successful. I am, however, examining that their efforts are not an example of inspired bubbling of grassroots politics unsupported from entrenched power. The Tea Party is rather an example of the synthesis of a guttural urge of the electorate with capitalism in its purest form. As such, it is a potential model for other efforts yet to come.

America is a capitalist country, centuries deep in its centuries more of political life and no chaotic uprising will challenge the near term direction of our powerful state. The thriving path forward for our nation must combine ideals with established capital. It must forge compromises in the essence of our forefathers who carved out a place for both the elite and the masses within our system of government.

Those that denigrate the Koch brothers for their Tea Party successes merely spit into the wind that blows from the bowels of a mighty American empire. Better to get on our hegemonic train than to get run over by it. Raise up your chalice of ideals and hitch yourselves to the wagons of our elite who can help to ease forward a symbiotic path.

Find solutions that benefit the masses and America’s capitalists together. This is the thriving path that must be forged. For America’s capitalism is impenetrable to the grass roots of disorganized movements. Our future must be guided from within by the means of capitalistic synergies for the good of all if we are to heighten the trajectory of our fairly new nation.

The Political Machine is a Frog Cooker

The collective power for change ultimately rests with the public and therefore some point to our failure for letting such political parades continue but there are barriers to entry that make the obvious voting solution for change a contankerous one.

Political parties hijacked the political process long ago. Votes are parsed along various social interests and Parties take opposite and extreme positions along these battle lines to split the electorate. Then candidates are chosen by the parties for their puppeting of these highly differentiated party lines to acquire voting majorities. From these slim majorities in the legislature, party bosses control ongoing votes down tthe party lines.

Campaign dollars collected by the parties then flood small segments of society and narrow, battleground geographies to persuade the votes of those that cannot otherwise be captured with these extremist techniques. After narrowly winning slim majorities, the winning party claims a right to vote down these same party line extremes. And from the vantage of these winning positions, parties then elicit billions of dollars from donors that obtain behind the scenes votes for financial gain from which slivers of profits can be re-introduced into the political machines to continue funding extremist campaign policies.

This machinery is a barrier to entry for those that might otherwise vote out the bastards in hopes of changing a country’s direction for the betterment of the economy and the vast middle class. So when the frog of the middle class electorate is exposed to the rising temperatures of the pot of political water such as described above, it is very difficult indeed for an unorganized groundswell movement of electorate to overcome such party politics through the mere act of voting.

Certainly, movements like the Tea Party and OWS can rise up, especially when both are funded behind the scenes by powerful monied interests, but seldom in history do we see ground swell movements overcome party politics. It can be done, usually as the water reaches a boiling point, but by that time the frog might be dead.

Democracy is Foiled Again

In the pre-dawn of reaction to what will inevitably be enforced austerity, the voice of the occupiers was easily drowned out by a few batons. In its stead, 2012 will be a year of uneasy impatience on the part of the American people. Neither party has thus found necessary the urgency to step into the political arena with any real choice. Both parties have been convinced by their benefactors that their chances for winning or maintaining political power are acceptable if they simply put forth status quo policies.

Neither party feels the need to buck their financial backers with bold choices for middle class America’s future. Instead, the Rupublicans, hoping to hand the 1% tax savings and regulatory loopholes, are content with feeding on the margins of “don’t vote for the party that continues to give you 8.2 percent unemployment”. The Democrats, recognizing that those same financial backers are this year telling them to be content with holding onto a majority of the seats they still enjoy, will not rile America’s elite and instead will rely on “women’s bodies will somehow be ripped from them and young ladies will be forced to turn once again to back alleys if America doesn’t give us four more years of tepid economic execution.

2008 was a breakout year of the youngest voting bloc. Sensing the gloom of their financial future, they voted for change. 2010 was a backlash toward the newest generation by the baby boomers pushing back that government costs and services must instead be cut. Both looked to each other for concessions instead of requiring the silent financial majority to participate in the discussion. 2012 is a year in which the 1% has instructed a bloated Fed to find the perfect balance before the storm with further stimulus.

Slight uptick in housing and jobs has confused Americans into unnerved complacency. Both parties speak of patriotism and promise a better tomorrow. Like Charlie Brown, the American public will once again hope that Lucy will not pick up the football to let us fall on our backs dejected.

Free book at thrivingpath.com

Float Reality for Just a Moment…… Could America be in an Extremist Bubble? (Revised)

Have you ever taken a jigsaw puzzle down from the closet on a rainy day and worked on its 1,000 pieces to completion? Ever stare at the puzzle that you have worked on for hours, only to find it is missing one important piece right in the middle of the puzzle? That missing puzzle piece might tempt you to insanity, first looking incessantly around the table, and then in the box, and in the closet where you kept the box, and in the garage where you originally stored the box before putting it the closet prior to bringing it out one rainy afternoon to spend hours working on the puzzle before realizing that one piece was missing!

To many, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements are frustrating puzzles with missing pieces. Some aggravatingly wonder why the Tea Party holds to their pledge of less government spending and taxes and why they are so willing to let America lunge over the cliff like a herd of possessed swine as they hold fast to their quest. It leads many to believe that Tea Partiers are just right wing ideologues blindly doing the bidding of globalist capitalists. Others question why Occupy Wall Streeters kept fluttering their fingers in free form street democracy even after authorities shut down their camps. They sensed that Occupiers were whiny idealists disrupting Middle America, following like sheep the directives of international Anarchists and Marxists who intend to destroy the capitalist foundations of America.

Many in America view these movements as extremist. But letting reality drift for a moment, what we found that these movements were actually Centrists and that America was the extreme one? If America were extreme, then under this remote scenario at least one of these two groups could actually be Centrist. If that were so, and if America could be tolerant for a moment, we might find that these movements were not irritating puzzles with missing pieces after all. We might conclude that they were truly two of the missing puzzle pieces that we are seeking in the midst of crisis, and that they were actually patriots trying to cajole America back to Centrism.

But many Americans don’t trust at least one of these movements for good reason. Those aggravated by the Tea Party surmise that it has accepted, as part of its platform, a globalist agenda that obfuscates itself in a cloak of Patriotism. Globalists solder Constitutional words like freedom onto words like trade so that the resulting power of the phrase “free trade” confuses America from a more prosperous course. Those annoyed by the Occupiers surmise that the Occupiers are influenced by Marxists who blame capitalism for harming America instead of the abuse of capitalism that has actually done the damage. However, if America paused for a moment to see that both movements were growing beyond their Globalist and Marxist roots, could we not find that they both have salient messages that could help turn-around America’s drifting course?

For the moment, let’s assume that both Occupy Wall Streeters and the Tea Party are solidly Centrist. Each appears extreme to some in America, so that is a difficult assumption. But if we suppose that America has indeed veered into extreme territory then we could imagine that they appear extreme because of America’s drift. Suppose that the bell curve of Western culture has shifted so far from true Centrism that America now stands on shifting sands of extreme change. If this were true, then America could perceive these two movements that might be chanting their centrist warnings from the terra firma, as if they are extremists spouting extremities, when in actuality they are not. If this were true, then America’s perception of itself being Centrist could also be quite extreme.

The following example might shed light on the pretense that America could already be extreme. As housing prices skyrocketed during the first half of the decade, their relative prices compared similarly. As prices shot into the stratosphere like a runaway freight train, mid priced homes continued to price in the middle of the mayhem, perhaps Centrist if you will. We now know however that what appeared as moderately Centrist home prices were actually quite radically priced.

Yet, while many Americans entered the house flipping craze, a few held steady mortgages for years. They did not refinance to meet material wants and they lived within their long term means. Many at the time viewed their peculiar steadfastness as ultra conservative. Yet we now know that they were only conservative through the lens of America’s momentary lapse of judgment. They were in fact true Centrists by historical terra firma standards.

If one example of misinterpreted centrism exists, might there be others? When a tsunami slams the shore, it forever rips the landscape from its modest history into a extreme future. The two World Wars of the 20th century that swept 80 million people off the face of the earth was a social tsunami. In its deadly wake, America produced Boomer Babies that disrupted the balance of everything in their path. Some would say that this Baby Boom tsunami swept America’s culture to extremes in unobservable slow motion, except to those who deliberately paused to reflect how Boomers ripped the world from its foundation.

If the two Great War tsunamis that destroyed 80 million souls and the subsequent tidal wave of Baby Boomers did in fact violently sweep America off its centrist foundation, perhaps the view from our shifted reality is now not Centrist at all, but instead radical. We tend to think of progress as forward motion. Any reversion of progress to a former era is viewed as radical. However, if we are really already radical, then placing America’s path back on the centrist foundation it would have had been on if not for our Baby Boomer tsunami should not be labeled as a radical reversion but rather as a righting of our true Centrist progression.

History shows that America did not return to our stable, pre-WWII Centrist path after the war. In fact, an objective examination of history would show that our entire generation embarked on a path that could in objective hindsight only be labeled as extremist, whether observed through the prism of either the conservatives or the progressives. If we are to find a way back to a growing and secure future in America, it is now time to honestly reflect on our history. That reflection might conclude that America did get caught up in a tsunami of extremism.

Our first post-war extremist thrust by both conservatives and progressives was to barrel down the path of building a military greater than all other nations combined. After WWII, America determined that an overwhelming military, more powerful than had ever existed before, was the correct measured response to the 20th century’s industrial unleashing of mankind’s destructive nature that had twice swarmed its deadly will. Our obsession with military superiority imbedded itself into our culture of defense and created a partially planned economy in America centered on our military complex. In the process of creating this modern dynasty of protection, our collective extremism sacrificed our economy to stave off the inevitability of man’s destruction.

We then recklessly spent our children’s future hoping not only to prevent the war that might otherwise end humanity, but also hoping to end poverty and oppression. After decades of budget increases, we were able to provide our poor with material consumption that made them wealthier than 85 percent of the rest of the world, but at what cost? Our national debt is now over 100 percent of our GDP. A centrist review of America’s deficit spending would have to conclude that we have not been Centrist in our spending.

Our extremism was not confined to the military and the Great Society. Baby Boomers also naively lived in the moment without securing our retirement. We now have a crisis over the empty coffers of Social Security and Medicare but we knew for decades it would come because America’s Baby Boomer generation chose not to save even knowing doing so would end in crisis. Was it not extremist to plan to bankrupt our children, forcing them to enjoy only half of our materialism so that we could consume half of their future? This extremist denial of responsibility to pay for our own military and Great Society excesses glaringly contradicted our perception that we were centrist champions of social equity.

Our generation spent our children’s’ future to extend the great society, to stave off Armageddon, and to enjoy the fruits of our parent’s frugality. Having forsaken our foundation of Centrism by indenturing future generations to pay for our excesses, how could we judge others who found it acceptable to gut America of jobs and factories, or who built banking Ponzis that indebted Americans to feed our capital to China. Who were we to judge when the Federal Reserve shook down other nations to fund our excesses or when the two reigning parties of Congress sold their souls to secure continuing re-elections.

With such moral ambiguity, we became trapped in relativism. Our nation was then unchained from any semblance of fiscal restraint and was free to drift toward a new norm of extremism, one in which we could argue amongst each other the relative turpitude of our choices while at the same time viewing our own progressive or conservative ideas as Centrist. In this drift toward a conscious denial of extremism, there were too few of our generation that publicly warned America for having been as extreme as posterity will most undoubtedly judge us to have been.

Finally in desperation, Tea Partiers exclaimed that this nation had drifted so far from its original moorings that they had to stand up to America’s extremism. Aghast, America bemoaned this movement’s presumption of claiming they were the purveyors of True North. Yet, if America has drifted into extremism, then the Tea Partiers actually were most clearly viewing our danger, and should be regarded as heroes for having identified our nation’s drift before it destroyed us.

Some claim that the Tea Party’s adoption of Globalist ideas has kept it from winning over America to reverse our joblessness, a symptom of our excess. Even though their keen observation of our extremist drift did help to fight the expansion of our extreme Federal budget deficit, it did not give them the ability to see all excesses and to find a way to bring America back fully to Centrism. As such, the Wall Street Occupiers have emerged to help identify a possible course correction, and I suspect other movements will emerge as well.

America is annoyed by these two movements’ persistence, almost like an alcoholic would be annoyed by an intervention. Yet intolerantly scapegoating these movements will not change the fact that we are floating on debris of relative progress. However, if our entire Baby Boomer generation is “the bubble” and all of these economic bubbles that were and that are unfortunately imminently yet to come, are just exacerbations of our true bubble, then our Baby Boomer bubble must, as all bubbles do, return to its point of trend origin so that the world can begin again its balanced progression.
We can continue to argue in the extreme that housing prices should remain high but they will not. We can argue in the extreme that the stock market should stay inflated but it will return to its historical trend. We can argue that our national budget should continue artificially bloated to fund our Baby Boomer experiments of the war on poverty and a military to end all wars but it cannot. A few of our elite will continue to argue that unemployment will have to drift sideways for years to come, but it cannot. Instead America will drift back to what can be funded by the normal and Centrist progression of tomorrow’s workers and we will once again find our Centrist path.

We can continue our disdain for the “extremists” of our country, yet they are the Centrists of True North and we are unfortunately the extremists. To disdain ourselves would be unhealthy and thus we must return to a path of Centrism. Our nation was thrown excessively off course by world events and our Centrist Tea Party pointed out our excesses. Our Centrist Occupiers are searching for a way back to a Centrist capitalist democracy. Can we, having taken this journey of disorientation, now find our way back to true Centrism as well?

Inevitably, we will revert to the world’s centrist progression whether through the relative comfort of a blazoned and enlightened trail of American determination or through the precipitous fall of continued denial leading to economic implosion. However, the sooner we stop pointing fingers at our skewed perception of each other’s extremism and begin pulling our collective weight toward our historic and future Centrist progression, the sooner we will begin our nation’s reorientation to True North and the sooner we can begin our recovery.

Tea Partiers and Occupiers Should Take Up the Banner Together to Form a New Party

Despondency and Angst is peaking in America. Multiple movements are mounting opposition to what seems to be Congressional inaction toward the will of the people. Rhetoric is flying in attempts to find or divert fault for America’s ongoing and increasingly unstable financial crisis. Occupy Wall Streeters are organizing in opposition to international banks for their having extracted America’s wealth to China and having bank rolled a transfer of jobs and intellectual capital that would otherwise prosper the United States. A growing majority of Americans are sympathizing with the Occupiers, believing that banks and multinational businesses have corrupted Congress to pass legislation supporting their global aims at the expense of America’s future.

Americans are resigned that bankers and multinational businesses cannot be cajoled to protect our sovereignty over profits. It seems for many that America’s last bastion of hope lies in purging Congress of crony capitalism that weakens its resolve to place America’s interest above special interests. Tea Partiers suggest that if America reverts to strict constitutionalism that we might divert Congress from institutional corruption toward fiscal discipline. However, before concluding that our two-party Congress holds the solutions to America’s crisis, we should review whether there is a historical precedence to place our faith in its salvation.

Congress’s constitutional origin has been under miserable attack. As Roman legislators failed their countrymen, our Congress has taken up their fallen banner in succumbing to modern temptations. Congress fed off the world by deflating our dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and debt funded the selfish altruism of our baby boomer’s Great Society and obsession for military dominance with reckless abandon. Congress also vainly fell prey to Big Business’s courting to go along with legislation that greased the gold rush to China’s 1.3 billion consumer market. In so doing, they gave an inside lane for our elite to prosper from globalization at the expense of collapsing our Middle Class. Strengthening Congress’s will against these temptations seems a lynchpin for correcting America’s troubles, yet Congress has proven that it cannot protect Americans even from being devoured by our own.

An emerging theory is that by reverting to an earlier constitutional construct in history, we might be able to eliminate the power of big business and banking to influence Congress and to minimize Congress’s incentive to indebt America. If that were possible, America could return Congress to its historical role and we could regain America’s Constitutional Republic. Yet, if we look back to an earlier period in America’s history, Congress acted much the same as it has today. In 1811 and the fifty years leading up to the Civil War, business and banking dominated Congress under wildly differing circumstances. Their influence yielded the crippling morals of slavery and a devastating war between the states. If Congress was manipulated 200 years ago to such tragic ends, perhaps reverting to nostalgic fixes to mitigate Congress’s modern ills would end just as tragically.

In 1811, America had grown under the financial eye of the First National Bank and political support of Congress, whose strategy was to build America’s industry under the protection of tariffs to compete with the more highly developed commerce of Europe. By 1811, 87 percent of America’s exports were the South’s cotton and tobacco. The majority of these agricultural products were either processed in New England or transferred to England by American ships out of New York and Boston. This balance of banking, Northern industry, Southern agriculture, and shipping depended on slave labor to supply cotton to England, who employed 20 percent of her labor pool making cloth from America’s cotton. Yet, slavery was a growing abomination among many in America, and this shift in public opinion created a dangerous threat to America’s export engine that Congress counted on to bring back gold and foreign goods to America.

Earlier, in 1803, France’s Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory to America for $15 million dollars to fund his planned invasion of England. Enraged, England retaliated by instigating insurgence of American’s indigenous natives against settlers, by impressing 10,000 Americans off of American ships to fight on English ships, by pirating American ships for the war effort, and by barring American ships from other ports. As a result, America’s slave supported, export industry was severely damaged and her economy was threatened.

Of the two paths, appeasement and war, America’s Federalist Party supported appeasing sanctions, a strategy that only further harmed America’s export industry. The Democrats favored War and in 1810 elected War Hawks to Congress to push for what became the War of 1812. Senators Calhoun (SC), representing the South’s cotton industry, Clay (KY) representing Kentucky’s tobacco industry, and Webster (MA), representing New England’s shipping industry, were the leaders of the war effort. While they suggested publicly that war must be initiated to salvage America’s honor, these members of Congress were much more interested in salvaging America’s business interests, and certainly were less concerned with the dishonor of slavery.

Nervous about the growing antislavery sentiment and the First National Bank’s growing financial power that could upset the balance of states’ power regarding slavery, the Democrats fought and won the congressional battle not to renew the bank’s charter in 1811. Steven Girard, the richest man in America, a shipping magnate who was the largest shareholder of the First National bank, was also a war hawk. When America needed money to continue the war, he lent her his entire fortune. He doubled his wealth during the war and was rewarded as the largest shareholder in the newly formed Second National Bank in 1816. Shortly after the war under his guidance, the Second National Bank focused its efforts once again on rebuilding the agricultural-industrial-shipping-slave dominated economic engine of America. Banking’s interest in 1816 was not in correcting social injustice but in continuing it.

From the Missouri Compromise of 1820 through the 1854 Nebraska-Kansas Act, Congress maintained on behalf of business the balance of power between slave owning states and non-slave owning states, ignoring the North’s increasing condemnation of slavery. This growing antislavery sentiment threatened to destroy the wealth creating engine that banks, factory owners, plantation owners and the shipping industry had built. Any imbalance of state power could have destroyed the export economy, yet the 1820 compromise kept an uneasy denial in place for 34 years.

Antislavery legislation would have impacted the South much more greatly than the North because its entire economy was slave driven. From America’s founding, the North had placed its financial capital into industrial assets while the South had placed the majority of its capital into land and slaves. By 1854, 3 percent of the population of the South owned 90 percent of the land and 20 percent of the population owned 98 percent of the slaves. The economic prosperity of the South’s gentry was too ingrained in slavery to turn from it without devastating the economic and social structure of the South and that fact was reflected in its political defensiveness.

The North’s growing prosperity was also buoyed by low cost, albeit consensual, workers. A steady influx of immigrant indentured servants filled New England’s factories before heading into the Western territories to start new lives as settlers. Senator Douglas (IL) pressed to build a transcontinental railroad that would send these immigrants out from Chicago into the territories, and that would bring immense riches back to the business leaders of his state. In 1854, needing to add the area of Nebraska and Kansas to America’s territories to support the railroad, Senator Douglas pushed to keep the balance of power between slave and non-slave states by increasing the geography of slave territory beyond America’s uneasy compromise of 1820. This reversal of America’s slavery containment policy was the last straw among abolitionists. With the rallying cry to end slavery, they broke from the Whig Party to form the Republican Party.

The 1854 act inflamed the passions of Americans who had grown increasingly intolerant of slavery. All of the Southern Democrats voted for the 1854 act. 44 of 91 Northern Democrats joined them in defying the will of the majority of their states’ constituents, even if their votes did support the business interests of their state elites. At the end of 1854 elections, Northern Democrats had been reduced from 91 to 25 congressman and only 7 of the 44 that had voted for the 1854 Act kept their seats. The Republican Party, founded on principle of human dignity, finally broke with the established business/political balance between the two main political parties. This break tipped the uneasy balance of power and thrust America into Civil War.

From the signing of the Constitution in 1787 until the elections of 1860, American politicians and businesses had attempted to avoid the growing moral voice of America. Had they listened, a new political party would not have formed to coalesce those without a political voice. Could the Whigs and Democrats in Congress have managed the growing animosity toward slavery while still meeting the needs of America’s businesses? In that same vein, could the Republicans and Democrats today give America’s Middle Class its needed political voice while still giving our industries the greatest chance to succeed in international business?

Until the dramatic political shift that led to the battles of the Civil War, Congress was unwilling to find common ground with abolitionists. In the wake of their indifference, a new party rose on the shoulders of the disenfranchised and charged America into a bloody resolution of its greatest crisis. History may prove once again that Congress has an institutional indifference to the will of the American people. Rather than a nostalgic turn to find a congressional balance from our past, Americans must now be willing to take up the banner of those courageous abolitionists and forge a new path forward that places the will of America first.

Is Congress Punch Drunk?

In 2010, two Democrat Congressmen walk into a bar. One quips to the other, “This unemployment situation is getting pretty bad, how we should focus on it.” The other sternly replies, “I don’t know about you, but I for one am going to make sure they have health care when they finally get a job!”

Punch line: Tea Party

In 2011, two Republican campaign strategists walk into a bar. One says to the other “Hey what kind of slogan can we have for the unemployment situation.” The other one says, “How about – Hey you lazy bum, go get a job!”

Punch line: Occupy Wall Street

Yesterday, two Republican senators walked into a bar. One said to the other, “I am concerned that our free trade legislation created extended high unemployment that has hurt our ability to make good on our pledge to reduce the deficit. What do we do?” “I know”, the other one chirps, “Let’s introduce legislation to significantly shorten the term of unemployment compensation!”

Punch Line: Are you kidding me? These aren’t jokes!

Congress’s obtuse politicians should spend a little less time in bars and a lot more time helping to get Lady Liberty back on her feet.

Could America’s Extremism Be Stopping Our Recovery?

Have you ever taken a jigsaw puzzle down from the closet on a rainy day and worked on its 1,000 pieces to completion? Ever stare at the puzzle that you have worked on for hours, only to find it is missing one important piece right in the middle of the puzzle? That missing puzzle piece might tempt you to insanity, first looking incessantly around the table, and then in the box, and in the closet where you kept the box, and in the garage where you originally stored the box before putting it the closet prior to bringing it out one rainy afternoon to spend hours working on the puzzle before realizing that one piece was missing!

To many, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements are frustrating puzzles with missing pieces. Some aggravatingly wonder why the Tea Party holds to their pledge of less government spending and taxes and why they are so willing to let America lunge over the cliff like a herd of possessed swine as they hold fast to their quest. It leads them to believe that Tea Partiers are just right wing ideologues blindly doing the bidding of globalist capitalists. Others question why Occupy Wall Streeters keep fluttering their fingers in free form street democracy even after authorities have shut down their camps. They sense that Occupiers are whiny idealists disrupting Middle America, following like sheep the directives of international Anarchists and Marxists who intend to destroy the capitalist foundations of America.

Many in America view these movements as extremist. But letting reality drift for a moment, what we found that these movements were actually Centrists and that America was the extreme one? If America were extreme, then under this remote scenario at least one of these two groups could actually be Centrist. If that were so and America could be tolerant for a moment, we might find that these movements were not irritating puzzles with missing pieces after all. We might conclude that they were truly two of the missing puzzle pieces that we are seeking in the midst of crisis, and that they were actually patriots trying to cajole America back to Centrism.

But many Americans don’t trust at least one of these movements for good reason. Those aggravated by the Tea Party surmise that it has accepted, as part of its platform, a globalist agenda that obfuscates itself in a cloak of Patriotism. Globalists solder Constitutional words like freedom onto words like trade so that the resulting power of the phrase “free trade” confuses America from a more prosperous course. Those annoyed by the Occupiers surmise that the Occupiers are influenced by Marxists who blame capitalism, when it is actually the abuse of capitalism and not capitalism itself that has harmed our country. However, if America paused for a moment to see that both movements were growing beyond their Globalist and Marxist roots, could we find that they both have salient messages that could help turn-around America’s drifting course?

For the moment, let’s assume that both Occupy Wall Streeters and the Tea Party are solidly Centrist. Each appears extreme to some in America, so that is a difficult assumption. But suppose they appear extreme because America has indeed veered into extreme territory itself. Suppose that the bell curve of Western culture has shifted so far from true Centrism that America now stands on shifting sands of extreme change. If this were true, then America could be perceiving these two movements that might be chanting their centrist warnings from the terra firma, as if they are extremists spouting extremities, when in actuality they are not. If this were true, then America’s perception of itself being Centrist could also be quite extreme.

The following example might shed a dim light on the perception that America could already be extreme. As housing prices skyrocketed during the first half of the decade, their relative prices compared similarly. As prices shot into the stratosphere like a runaway freight train, mid priced homes continued to price in the middle of the mayhem, perhaps Centrist if you will. We now know however that what appeared as moderately Centrist home prices were actually quite radically priced.

Yet, while many Americans entered the house flipping craze, a few held steady mortgages for years. They did not refinance to meet material wants and they lived within their long term means. Many at the time viewed their peculiar steadfastness as ultra conservative. Yet we now know that they were only conservative through the lens of America’s momentary lapse of judgment. They were in fact true Centrists by historical terra firma standards.

When a tsunami slams the shore, it forever rips the landscape to extremes from its modest beginnings. The two World Wars of the 20th century that swept 80 million people off the face of the earth was a social tsunami. In its deadly wake, America produced Boomer Babies that disrupted the balance of everything in their path. Some would say that this Baby Boom tsunami swept America’s culture to extremes in slow motion, even if unobservable to those who did not deliberately pause to reflect how Boomers ripped the world from its foundation.

If the two Great War tsunamis that destroyed 80 million souls and the subsequent tidal wave of Baby Boomers did in fact violently, even if in slow motion, sweep America off its centrist foundation, perhaps the view from our shifted reality is now not Centrist at all, but instead highly radical. We tend to think of progress as forward motion. Any reversion of progress to a former era is viewed as radically conservative. However, if we really are in a radicalized position, then placing America’s path back on the centrist foundation it would have had if not for our Baby Boomer tsunami should not be labeled as a radically conservative reversion but rather as a righting of our true Centrist progression.

History shows that America did not return to our stable, pre-WWII Centrist path after the war. In fact, an objective examination of history would show that our entire generation embarked on a path that could in objective hindsight only be labeled as extremist, whether observed through the prism of conservatives or of progressives. If we are to find a way back to a growing and secure future in America, it is now time to honestly reflect on our history. That reflection will conclude that America did get caught up in a tsunami of extremism.

Our first post-war extremist thrust by both conservatives and progressives was to barrel down the path of building a military greater than all other nations combined. After WWII, America determined that an overwhelming military, more powerful than had ever existed before, was the correct measured response to the 20th century’s industrial unleashing of mankind’s destructive nature that had twice swarmed its deadly will. Our obsession with military superiority imbedded itself into our culture of defense and created a partially planned economy in America centered on our military complex. In the process of creating this modern dynasty of protection, our collective extremism drained our economy of its life giving blood in sacrifice to the altar of war.

Many in America view these movements as extremist. But letting reality drift for a moment, what we found that these movements were actually Centrists and that America was the extreme one? If America were extreme, then under this remote scenario at least one of these two groups could actually be Centrist. If that were so and America could be tolerant for a moment, we might find that these movements were not irritating puzzles with missing pieces after all. We might conclude that they were truly two of the missing puzzle pieces that we are seeking in the midst of crisis, and that they were actually patriots trying to cajole America back to Centrism.

But many Americans don’t trust at least one of these movements for good reason. Those aggravated by the Tea Party surmise that it has accepted, as part of its platform, a globalist agenda that obfuscates itself in a cloak of Patriotism. Globalists solder Constitutional words like freedom onto words like trade so that the resulting power of the phrase “free trade” confuses America from a more prosperous course. Those annoyed by the Occupiers surmise that the Occupiers are influenced by Marxists who blame capitalism, when it is actually the abuse of capitalism and not capitalism itself that has harmed our country. However, if America paused for a moment to see that both movements were growing beyond their Globalist and Marxist roots, could we find that they both have salient messages that could help turn-around America’s drifting course?

For the moment, let’s assume that both Occupy Wall Streeters and the Tea Party are solidly Centrist. Each appears extreme to some in America, so that is a difficult assumption. But suppose they appear extreme because America has indeed veered into extreme territory itself. Suppose that the bell curve of Western culture has shifted so far from true Centrism that America now stands on shifting sands of extreme change. If this were true, then America could be perceiving these two movements that might be chanting their centrist warnings from the terra firma, as if they are extremists spouting extremities, when in actuality they are not. If this were true, then America’s perception of itself being Centrist could also be quite extreme.

We then recklessly spent our children’s future hoping not only to prevent the war that might otherwise end humanity, but also hoping in vain to end poverty and oppression. After decades of budget increases, we were able to provide our poor with material consumption that made them wealthier than 85 percent of the rest of the world, but at what cost? Our national debt is now over 100 percent of our GDP. A centrist perspective of America’s deficit spending habits would have to conclude that we have not been Centrist in our spending. Yet, our extremism was not confined to the military and the Great Society. For instance, Baby Boomers also naively lived in the moment without securing our retirement.

Our decry over the empty coffers of Social Security and Medicare comes after decades of known imbalances between future costs and dwindling payer ratios, and yet America’s Baby Boomer generation chose not to store nuts for the coming winter knowing our procrastination would end in crisis. Was our extremist plan really to bankrupt our children, forcing them to enjoy only half of our materialism so that we could consume half of their future? This denial of responsibility to pay for our own excesses glaringly contradicted our self perceived vision of being champions of social equity.

Our generation spent our children’s’ future to extend the great society, to stave off Armageddon, and to enjoy the fruits of our parent’s frugality. Having forsaken our foundation of Centrism by indenturing future generations to pay for our excesses, how could we judge others who found it acceptable to gut America of jobs and factories, or who built banking Ponzis that indebted Americans to feed our capital to China. Who were we to judge when the Federal Reserve shook down other nations to fund our excesses or when the two reigning parties of Congress sold their souls to secure continuing re-elections.

With such moral ambiguity, we became trapped in relativism. Our nation was then unchained from any semblance of moral restraint and was free to drift toward a new norm of extremism, one in which we could argue amongst each other the relative turpitude of our choices while at the same time viewing our own progressive or conservative ideas as Centrist. In this ambivalent drift toward a conscious denial of extremism, there were too few of our generation that publicly warned America for having been as extreme as posterity will most undoubtedly judge us to have been.

Finally in desperation, Tea Partiers exclaimed that this nation had drifted so far from its original moorings that they had to stand up to America’s extremism. Aghast, America bemoaned this movement’s presumption of claiming they were the purveyors of True North. Yet, if America has drifted into extremism, then the Tea Partiers actually were most clearly viewing our danger, and should be regarded as heroes for having identified our nation’s drift before it destroyed us.

The Tea Party’s adoption of Globalist ideas has kept it from winning over America to reverse our joblessness, a symptom of our excess. Their keen observation of our extremist drift did give the Tea Party the sole focus of braking the drift by fighting the Federal budget deficit, but it did not give them extraordinary powers to rudder our island back home to Centrism. As such, the Wall Street Occupiers have emerged to help identify a possible course correction, and I suspect other movements will emerge as well.

Annoyed by these two movements’ persistence, America is cackling at their disruption and blaming both movements for attempting to stop our extremism. Yet intolerantly scapegoating these movements will not change the fact that we are where we are. We are floating on debris of relative progress and wrongly judging any attempts to retrace as regressive. However, if our entire Baby Boomer generation is “the bubble” and all of these economic bubbles that were and that are unfortunately imminently yet to come, are just exacerbations of our true bubble, then our Baby Boomer bubble must, as all bubbles do, return to its point of trend origin so that the world can begin again its balanced progression.

We can continue to argue in the extreme that housing prices should remain high but they will not. We can argue in the extreme that the stock market should stay inflated but it will return to its historical trend. We can argue that our national budget should continue artificially bloated to fund our Baby Boomer experiments of the war on poverty and a military to end all wars but it cannot. A few of our elite will continue to argue that unemployment will have to drift sideways for years to come, but it cannot. Instead America will drift back to what can be funded by the normal and Centrist progression of tomorrow’s workers and we will once again find our Centrist path.

We can continue our disdain for the “extremists” of our country, yet they are the Centrists of True North and we are unfortunately the extremists. To disdain ourselves would be unhealthy and thus we must return to a path of Centrism. Our nation was thrown excessively off course by world events and our Centrist Tea Party pointed out our excesses. Our Centrist Occupiers are searching for a way back to a Centrist capitalist democracy. Can we, having taken this journey of disorientation, now find our way back to true Centristism as well?

Inevitably, we will revert to the world’s centrist progression whether through the relative comfort of a blazoned and enlightened trail of American determination or through the precipitous fall of continued denial leading to economic implosion. However, the sooner we stop pointing fingers at our skewed perception of each other’s extremism and begin pulling our collective weight toward our historic and future Centrist progression, the sooner we will begin our nation’s reorientation to True North and the sooner we can begin our recovery.