New Media Alliance - Thomas E. Brewton

By Thomas E. Brewton

Bill Moyers’s PBS presentation on Cleveland’s real estate foreclosure problem was a product, either of economic ignorance, or of deliberate distortion for political purposes.

Friday night’s Bill Moyers’ Journal on PBS placed the blame for Cleveland’s very real foreclosure problem on financial institutions’ greed, along with the Bush administration’s indifference to human suffering.

Applying the same analysis to the spread of AIDS, Parson Moyers might conclude that AIDS became a scourge because manufacturers of condoms were greedy. He would demand new Federal regulations to prevent AIDS, when, in fact, the root cause is immoral individuals’ rampant sexual promiscuity. If everyone had practiced sexual abstinence outside marriage, AIDS would be a minor footnote in medical journals.

Similarly, the underlying cause for the subprime mortgage meltdown and for the follow-on distress of foreclosures in places like Cleveland is the liberal-progressive-socialist welfare state and its array of entitlements financed by deficit spending, coupled with the infantile belief of borrowers, fostered by the liberal welfare state, that they are entitled to whatever they want, without first working and saving for it.

Ignoring the culpability of his own liberal-progressive-socialist cohort, Mr. Moyers blames all economic and social ills on private enterprise. Implicitly, in his world view, non-government action by individuals and businesses is motivated by anti-social greed, if not malice.

For this, the antidote always is additional Federal spending and more regulation. The repeated lesson of history – that government intervention always has unanticipated and usually negative consequences – is ignored.

To present his case, Mr. Moyers interviews the director of a Cleveland homeless shelter, whose job presumably qualifies him to pontificate on the workings of finance and the economy. He also interviews William Greider, a writer for The Nation, one of our oldest socialist publications, a man whose journalistic career has been devoted to bashing private enterprise and to extolling the nascent forces of socialism. While Parson Moyers clucks in horror, these gentlemen tell us that the foreclosure problem was caused by capitalist greed and the indifference of Federal regulators. Imprudence of borrowers, in a good socialist society of welfare entitlements, of course, had nothing to do with it.

Looking at the history of Cleveland demonstrates, however, that the spate of foreclosures is just the current manifestation of decades-old economic ills arising from the metastasis of socialism at the Federal, state, and city levels.

In the 1950s, Cleveland was a thriving industrial city, the 7th largest in the United States, with a population of approximately one million. Today, it is less than half that size. John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company was originally headquartered there. Cleveland was one of the largest ports on the Great Lakes, and it was the largest iron ore trading and shipping port in the world. Major automobile and steel production was centered there, along with one of the largest concentrations of railroad transportation in the nation.

By 1966 all of that was collapsing. The straws on the camel’s back were the Hough riots from July 18 to 23 in 1966, which resulted in more than 240 fires, four deaths, and hundreds of serious injuries. This span of rioting was one of many that afflicted major cities in the northeast, the midwest, and California in the years after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts and the Johnson administration’s enactment of the Great Society welfare entitlements. In what the New York Times called the revolution of rising expectations, inner city blacks decided that the best way to improve their lives was to loot and to burn down businesses and housing.

With Cleveland police and firefighters unable to maintain control in large sections of the city, businesses began relocating, usually to the Sunbelt states, where taxes, regulations, and labor unionization were less costly and burdensome.

Higher taxes and more regulation are the hallmark of liberal-progressivism, the first, to redistribute income in accord with socialism’s conception of social justice, the second, to socialize business via indirect government control, as Henrie de Saint-Simon had proposed in the first decades of the 19th century, when he systematized the concept of socialism.

Among the counter-productive regulations, Thomas Sowell writes, was the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which set the stage for foreclosures in Cleveland and elsewhere by forcing lenders to make loans in high risk areas, to people with poor credit records.

Labor unions’ ability to push up labor costs to heights that drove major employers to new locations in the non-union Sunbelt states was a product of the New Deal’s legislation conferring monopoly powers upon unions and making most business resistance to unions unlawful.

The hypocrisy of Parson Moyers’s sanctimonious inquisition is particularly galling, because he was present at the creation of a major element of the mess, working as special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson at the time of the Hough riots.

Socialism and its inevitable inflation got their greatest push from the enactment of President Johnson’s Great Society, a set of programs that made a host of welfare handouts entitlements, regardless of merit or effort by the recipient. Without means testing, being permanently on welfare became a new career choice.

When, as in Cleveland, fewer people work for a living, taxes soar while government strives to keep up with demands for ever-rising welfare spending. Illegitimate births increase, education deteriorates, and violent crime increases rapidly.

Had there been no massive expansion of the socialist welfare state in President Johnson’s Great Society, along with the judicial activism of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren that created a panoply of criminals’ rights, there would have been no Hough riots.

Since the imposition of socialism Under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933, deficit spending by the Federal government, chiefly now on mandated welfare entitlements, has been funded with over-expansion of the money supply by the Federal Reserve. By definition, this is inflation, which artificially puffed up housing prices and fueled demand for houses on the assumption that prices could only go up.

When the economy is awash in inflationary currency, bankers will find a way to lend the funds, and businesses will find ways to use borrowed money on ever more risky projects. Inflation produced by the excessive money supply impels lenders to seek higher rates of return to compensate for the declining value of money repaid against their lending, just as businesses must seek ever higher rates of return for their investments. Unfortunately, higher rates of return are associated with greater risk, such as subprime mortgage lending.

Banks and mortgage originators have paid for their folly with massive losses. Meanwhile the real culprits - liberal-progressive legislators - are now playing the hero’s role, posturing with legislative hearings to impose yet more ineffective and counterproductive regulations.

None of this excuses unethical lending methods. But neither does it absolve the imprudence of welfare-state citizens who have come to believe that they are entitled to whatever they desire, without the need first to work and save to pay for it.

Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.

His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/

Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com

By Thomas E. Brewton

We must reject comfortable ritual and live the Christian life.

Sunday’s sermon at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) was preached by Captain Brian Thomas, leader of Stamford’s Salvation Army unit.

An effective Salvation Army leader who desires to lead souls to Jesus Christ can’t mindlessly and endlessly repeat old rituals. In Captain Thomas’s case, that meant dropping the old Salvation Army standard of the brass band playing on street corners to draw the unchurched into church services. Not enough people in today’s circumstances respond.

Instead he went into the low-income housing projects and began bussing children to church services and bussing them back to their homes. Just as did the liberal-progressive educators led by John Dewey early in the 20th century, aiming to destroy our Judeo-Christian heritage and replace it with a socialistic society, Captain Thomas recognized that the future belongs to those who educate our children. They must hear the truth of the gospel in some venue, because our secular public educational system is busily inculcating them with godless materialism.

Before Captain Thomas took up his post in Stamford, Salvation Army sunday services had been quiet, traditional affairs. Bringing large numbers of rambunctious kids into the services upset many of the regular adult attenders, who left in a huff.

Captain Thomas’s response was that Christianity doesn’t offer trial memberships to let you see if you will feel comfortable attending church. Christianity, if it is to be a way of life, must be demanding and uncomfortable for all of us. We must be challenged to climb out of our ruts and to reach out to help people in need. Mindlessly repeating old practices is not a formula for saving souls.

If people are not challenged to live the Christian life, ritualistic habit can turn even God’s past actions into false idols.

[After the exodus from Egypt, the Israelites] traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way; they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the desert? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!”

Then the LORD sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned when we spoke against the LORD and against you. Pray that the LORD will take the snakes away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people.

The LORD said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, he lived.”
(Numbers 21:4-9)

750 years later, the Israelites had again strayed from God and fallen into worshipping false idols, making the bronze snake into an object of worship. King Hezekiah acted to bring them back to God.

In the third year of Hoshea son of Elah king of Israel, Hezekiah son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign. He was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem twenty-nine years. His mother’s name was Abijah daughter of Zechariah. He did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, just as his father David had done. He removed the high places, smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles. He broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made, for up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense to it. (It was called Nehushtan.)

Hezekiah trusted in the LORD, the God of Israel. There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him. He held fast to the LORD and did not cease to follow him; he kept the commands the LORD had given Moses. And the LORD was with him; he was successful in whatever he undertook. He rebelled against the king of Assyria and did not serve him. From watchtower to fortified city, he defeated the Philistines, as far as Gaza and its territory.” (2 Kings 18:1-8)

If we are to be true Christians, we have to cease worshipping the bronze snakes in our religious lives. We have to step out of our comfort zones and follow Jesus.

Jesus told the Pharisees that he came, not to destroy the Mosaic Law, but to fulfill it. That required making lots of comfortable religious practitioners very uncomfortable, and ultimately angry enough to crucify Him.

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him.”

In reply Jesus declared, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.”

“How can a man be born when he is old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born!”

Jesus answered, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

“How can this be?” Nicodemus asked.

“You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:1-16)

Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.

His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/

Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com

By Thomas E. Brewton

If Senator Obama’s magic change-wand truly works, the change we need is eradication from our society of the degraded and debauched ethos of liberal-progressive-socialism that led us to inflation and near collapse of financial markets.

It is currently fashionable for liberal commentators to denounce capitalist free markets as the culprit in the housing bubble collapse. That amounts to blaming the existence of law and a judicial system for causing crime.

When massive government intervention wildly distorts the signals and incentives in commercial, industrial, and financial markets, blame lies with the government. In the present crisis, blame attaches principally to nearly unbroken deficit spending since 1929, financed by the Federal Reserve’s expansion of the money supply faster than increases in real production.

Add to this government incentives for citizens to consume goods and services faster than they produce them.

The beginning of this ethos was in the 1930s New Deal, but it really took hold after the 1960s and 70s student activism and the riots and burnings of our major cities.

Federal deficit spending and deliberate, massive inflation (i.e., devaluing the dollar) were the New Deal’s methods of choice in its destructive and completely unsuccessful effort to end the Depression.

The secular religion of liberal-progressive-socialism, imposed upon us in the 1930s New Deal, holds forth the utopian promise of heaven on earth, in a political society characterized by plenty for all, peace, and social harmony. To attain this secular paradise, we had only to abandon Judeo-Christian morality and to place our fate in the hands of the academic theorists who peopled the 1930s Roosevelt administration, his socialist Brain Trust.

The generation who survived the Depression and World War II were slow to abandon the Judeo-Christian ethos that had been the unwritten constitution of the United States for its entire past history. After the 1960s and 70s, however, when more people attended college than ever before, socialist secularity became the nation’s dominant belief, inculcated by liberal-progressive educators.

Increasingly the public came to believe that it should be possible to get immediately whatever was desired, without the need first to work and save for it. That is the essence of President Franklin Roosevelt’s socialistic program he called our “Second Bill of Rights.”

By 1944, when he began his fourth term (he was the only President unconstrained by the traditional limit of two terms), President Roosevelt candidly acknowledged in his State of the Union message that the New Deal welfare state was not part of the original Constitutional government of the United States and that the Constitution had never been amended, in accordance with the express provision of Article V, to legitimize the welfare state:

We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all – regardless of station, race, or creed. Among these are: The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the Nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; The right to a good education. All these rights spell security.

It is this “Second Bill of Rights” aspect of the liberal paradigm that leads today’s public, ignorant of history, to believe that healthcare and other welfare benefits are literally “constitutional rights.”

For a discussion of the mischief emanating from that distorted understanding of the Constitution, read Nicole Gelinas’s article on the City Journal website, : America, Too Big to Fail . . . Probably
The feds can bail out Fannie and Freddie, but who will bail out the feds?

Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.

His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/

Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com

By Thomas E. Brewton

Through Jesus Christ we have received the inestimable gift of the Holy Spirit as our counselor and comforter.

Pastor Steve Treash’s sermon this past Sunday at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) was on God’s gift to us of the Holy Spirit.

Unlike the major imperial religions that appeared in the world before Jesus Christ, Christianity gives believers a personal relationship with God. In earlier religions the ruler was the only connection between his subjects and the gods. From Hammurabi to the Pharaohs, law was promulgated by the ruler in the name of the gods, and social order was handed down from on high through the ruler.

Christianity turned this upside down, making it possible for every individual to gain remission of his sins directly by accepting Jesus Christ as his savior and repenting. To aid repentance and sanctification, God manifested Himself individually to believers as the Holy Spirit.

To describe the gift, Pastor Treash’s main text was Acts 1:1-5.

In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. After his suffering, he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”

Speaking to His disciples, Jesus said (John 14:15-20):

If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever— the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.

It should be obvious why we need the gift of the Holy spirit.

We cannot hope to live sinless and blameless lives as Jesus did, but with the Spirit of Christ in us through the Holy Spirit, we can live fulfilled lives of freedom and power.

The Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 8:5-11,

Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God.

You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.

How do we receive and open God’s gift?

In Acts 2:36-39, Peter said to the Jews in Jerusalem:

Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”

When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”

As the Apostle Paul never tired of noting, we cannot earn God’s grace through our actions, because we are all subject to original sin. We receive God’s grace only through our faith.

And that faith is not a one-time thing. We must continually seek God’s guidance in prayerful communion with the Holy Spirit. Our consciences must become open to the Holy Spirit if we are to know the right thing to do. God can’t come into our lives and sanctify us if we are worshipping other idols: money, business success, power, and possessions.

If we truly repent and seek what is best for ourselves and for service to others, God will give us guidance through the Holy Spirit.

Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! (Luke 11:11-13)

The aim is to live our lives filled with God’s gift of the Holy Spirit.

Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit. (Ephesians 5:15-18)

Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.

His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/

Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com

By Thomas E. Brewton

Senator Obama’s campaign is based upon a fantasy: his claimed ability to transcend politics-as-usual and thereby to unite the nation for a common purpose.

It isn’t just that Senator Obama lacks his claimed power. It’s that the secular religion he represents is entirely antithetical to everything that led to the foundation of the United States. The very existence of liberal-progressivism is divisive.

We Constitutional traditionalists were here first. It is the liberal-progressives who are an invading army of conquest, marching under the banner of an alien, Continental European philosophy of atheistic socialism.

To be a liberal-progressive is to view people as members of social, ethnic, and economic classes, most of them, if we are to believe Democrat/Socialist Party leaders, belonging to Karl Marx’s lumpen proletariat of unemployed, deprived, depressed, and oppressed. It is to believe that only government can improve people’s lives, because individuals are powerless in confrontation with the monopolistic, capitalist establishment.

The solution, in liberal-progressive doctrine, is to restructure society, redistributing income as evenly as possible. With the original doctrine of private property ownership removed from society, people will no longer be envious of each other, but will live harmoniously. Crime will disappear, because everyone will have his basic needs satisfied by collectivist government. We will become one, big, happy commune.

This is the essence of Senator Obama’s change that will bring us together by transcending the old politics.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that leaders of the Democrat-Socialist party, joined by mainstream media editorialists and so-called news reporters, continually decry objections from Constitutional traditionalists as divisive. For liberal-progressives, to oppose the transition to socialism is to stand in the path of scientific progress, to thwart the inevitable course of history.

Let’s remember on this Fourth of July, 2008, that the colonists in 1776 fought for something diametrically different from the liberal-progressive vision of salvation through the collectivized political state.

Most people have seen only the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence. The following lines are the meat of it.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. – Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

All of this boils down to one basic affront: the British government of George III and Parliament had consistently and repeatedly exercised arbitrary power to compel the colonies against their own interests.

Our nation was composed of independent and individualistic colonies that became the original states, with greatly differing geographical, agricultural, and commercial interests. They were united by a common heritage of Protestant Christianity and the rights of Englishmen, evidenced in the common law and the principle established in 1689 that even the king is subject to the laws of the land and to the higher power of God-given morality and justice.

Two years of intense public debate, from 1787 to 1789, were needed to secure ratification of the Constitution. The great fear was that it might grant too much arbitrary power to the government.

The fears of 1787-89 unfortunately have been realized, as the Federal government again and again overrides states’ powers guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and as the Federal judiciary arbitrarily creates and imposes law in opposition to the expressed will of citizens within the states.

The liberal-progressive ideal of a rabble-led democracy of the sort that emerged in the French Revolution the year of Constitutional ratification was emphatically rejected by the framers of the Constitution. James Madison, in the Federalist Papers, observed that, historically, pure democracies had been the worst and shortest-lived form of government. Pure democracies repeatedly dissolved into tyrannies when silver-tongued orators appealed to the masses with promises of welfare-state benefits in return for grants of more power to the orator.

The Constitution was, instead, intended to form a federal republic (not a European-style monolithic sovereignty), in which states retained most of the police powers to regulate the everyday life of their citizens.

Senator Obama represents the antithetical thrust of liberal-progressivism to collectivize power at the national level, reducing states to hat-in-hand sycophancy, and to revoke the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of private property rights.

Only by conquest through cultural civil war can Senator Obama and his liberal-progressive minions bring us together. It is they who are the divisive element in American politics, education, and business.

Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.

His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/

Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com