Loyalty to Self Over Country
The Fifth Column Frank Salvato, Managing Editor
May 30, 2008

Like it or not, the reality is that we live in an extremely self-centered society. If you take issue with this statement just watch how pedestrians enter into crosswalks during rush hour. Ignoring that pedestrians only have the right of way when they are within the crosswalk, today’s bipeds don’t hesitate at all to walk directly in front of moving vehicles, expecting to be protected from trauma by their imagined “right” to occupy a space versus a 4,000lbs vehicle. While this example illustrates how being self-centered – or arrogant...or vacuous – can cause personal harm, these same character flaws can cause harm to the country.

It could be argued that the arrogance prevalent in today’s American culture is a direct by-product of our entitlement society; a society that manufactures high self-esteem and then bestows it on people who have done nothing to deserve it. Logic mandates that when a person believes that he is the “end all be all” it isn’t that far of a stretch for that person to develop a belief that he is owed the good things of life; to expect things rather than to work toward earning them. This can lead to a culture populated entirely with “chiefs” with nary an “Indian” to be found. A society – or an organization, government, team, etc. – cannot function when everyone expects to be the boss.

This prevailing character flaw is effecting more than the individual. Its collective societal impart is corroding the fiber of our nation and doing so in every walk of life.

In education we are seeing teachers, administrators and union infiltrators narcissistically injecting their special interest topics into class curriculum and beyond. Where in eras past the onus of education was on the mastery of the tools that contribute to the gathering of information, its discernment and the development of critical thinking skills, today there is more emphasis placed on sex education than reading and on diversity than the accurate teaching of American history.

The encroachment of special interest content in curriculum, at the hand of factional narcissism, is producing graduates who possess an artificially elevated level of self-esteem but no critical thinking skills. The self-centered nature of what can only be termed our public special interest educational system is churning out graduates who believe they are correct on every issue they address even when they know very little about the issue. After all, they have been taught that it is their right to be correct.

The cancer of societal arrogance can be seen in the public arena as well.

Former Presidential Press Secretary Scott McClellan is engaging the talk show circuit to promote his new “tell all” book about his disillusionment with his White House years. In his offering he contends that not only was he lied to about a number of things but that he himself perpetrated disinformation on the American public, sometimes unknowingly and other times with full knowledge of the truth. Of course, the Socialist-Progressive-Left is glomming onto his portrayal of the Bush Administration as the gospel, even in the face of repudiation by an overwhelming number of those who would know the truth.

I for one am categorizing McClellan’s literary effort as a work of fiction tinged with a splattering of reference to actual events and here’s why.

All you ever had to do was to watch a press conference led by McClellan to understand that he was never – in his wildest dreams – ever going to be offered one of those high-paying contributor jobs by FOX News, MSNBC or CNN. Besides being unable to cogently communicate the message of the White House, McClellan always seemed to be on the verge of “flop sweat,” the malady of perspiration occasionally affecting comedians who are “bombing.” To say his communication skills were wanting would be an understatement.

Because McClellan wasn’t “set for life” due to his years in the employment of the White House, it would seem a “no brainer” to write a book about them and as we all know the literary field is filled with nefarious characters who would put book sales above the truth.

I mention the truth because in interviews McClellan has eluded to the notion that former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff ‘Scooter’ Libby and Presidential Advisor Karl Rove colluded behind closed doors on the Valerie Plame issue. McClellan makes his claim while admitting he wasn’t privy to any conversation taking place between Rove and Libby on the issue. Rove has indicated that none took place. He explained that not only did their respective official duties require he and Libby to interact almost on a daily basis but that they were friends away from work. Even to the most appeasable eye it is transparent that McClellan included this assertion to sell books, most likely at the prodding of his publisher.

Which presents these questions: Why? Why now? Did he think beyond his own selfish reasons for writing this book before he signed on?

We have already arrived at the answer to the first question. McClellan did it for the money. Why now is apparent. The time is ripe for a scandal-ridden tell-all book on the Bush Administration. With the president not running for office, the Socialist-Progressive-Left and the rest of the Democrats would eat this book up. Congressman Robert Wexler (D-FL) has already indicated he wants McClellan to testify to his allegations in front of the House Judiciary Committee. McClellan’s allegations will no doubt be used by Leftist spin doctors in an effort to discredit John McCain, pay no mind to the fact that McCain and President Bush have clashed on just about every piece of legislation and appointment during the president’s tenure.

That leaves us with the third question: Did McClellan think beyond his own selfish reasons for writing this book before he signed on? The answer to this question is debatable but I have to believe that he didn’t.

While I take issue with McClellan’s talents as a presidential press secretary and his mastery of critical thinking skills, I don’t go as far as to question his patriotism. I believe he loves his country. That said I do not believe that he understands the consequences of his actions, and I believe his actions to be not only disloyal to a man who gave him perhaps the most important experience of his life but self-centered and visionless.

We stand, as a nation, with boots on the ground in a battle for the survival of our country, our uniquely American ideology. Where we have a violent and advancing foe in aggressive Islamofascism we also have a foe in those who would destroy our nation from the inside; the American Fifth Column. These people will stop at nothing and employ any propaganda – no matter how devoid of fact, no matter how transparently false – to succeed in electing and installing those who would transform our Constitutional Republic into a Socialist democracy. McClellan’s tome is a vehicle tailor made for this effort.

As we enter in to the final stages of this excruciatingly long election cycle (thank you Democrats) you can bet the farm that those who employ deceitful partisan political tactics in their quest for power will use the questionable information in McClellan’s book to their advantage. They will quote McClellan as an “in-the-know” Bush insider even though former Assistant to the President and Counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney, Mary Matalin, espouses that McClellan was a non-contributor in meetings and that he was seldom privy to policy discussions. The American Fifth Column will embrace McClellan’s allegations as truth and promote them with vigor through a complicit mainstream media.

Whether McClellan intended for his book to serve as a tool used to advance the American Fifth Column is uncertain, but one thing isn’t, the self-centered actions of this alleged friend to George W. Bush, the person, have done exactly that.

It would seem that in today’s America the concept of loyalty is wasted on the self-absorbed.

Frank Salvato is the Executive Director and Director of Terrorism Research for BasicsProject.org a non-profit, non-partisan, 501(c)(3) research and education initiative. His writing has been recognized by the US House International Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict Prevention.

Let's face it. Supply and demand will never replace "need" and "greed" in political discussions of economic issues.

Talking about the "need" for more affordable housing or more affordable medical care is what will get politicians more votes this election year.

Voters don't want to hear about impersonal things like supply and demand. They want to hear about how their political heroes will stop the villains from "gouging" them or "exploiting" them with high prices.

Moral melodrama is where it's at, politically.

Least of all do voters want to hear about the most fundamental reality of economics-- that what everybody wants has always added up to more than there is.

That is called scarcity-- and if there were no scarcity, there would be no economics. What would be the point, if we could all have everything we want, in whatever amount we want?

There were no economists in the Garden of Eden because everything was available in unlimited abundance.

A politician with good rhetorical skills can create a new Garden of Eden in people's minds, though only in their minds. However, that is sufficient, if that vision or illusion can be kept alive until election day, and its failure to materialize afterwards can be explained away by the obstruction of villains.

One of the many ironies of politics is that those politicians who do the most to reduce supply often express the greatest outrage about high prices.

So long as the voters buy it, the politicians will keep selling it.

Make a list of those politicians who do the most to prevent our drilling for our own oil. Then make a list of those politicians who express the most outrage about the high price of gasoline. Don't be surprised if you see the same names on both lists.

Make a list of those politicians who most loudly lament the lack of "affordable housing." Then make a list of those politicians who have most consistently promoted restrictions on the building of housing, under the banner of "open space" laws, "farmland protection" policies, preventing "urban sprawl," and other politically soothing phrases Again, do not be surprised at seeing the same folks on both lists.

Is it really too "complex" to figure out that taking vast amounts of land off the market will make the price of the remaining land far more expensive? Or that houses built on very expensive land will be very expensive housing?

Despite the current decline in housing prices, a recent advertisement in a Palo Alto, California, newspaper listed a vacant lot for sale at $879,000. If you build anything more elaborate than a tent on that property, you are talking about a million-dollar home, be it ever so humble.

Many of the places with very high housing prices have very modest homes on very small amounts of land. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about a graduate student seeking a place to live, "visiting one exorbitantly priced hovel after another."

It is not at all uncommon for land to cost more than the housing that is built on it, in those places where politicians have made housing unaffordable with land use restrictions under pretty names-- all the while lamenting the lack of affordable housing.

So long as politicians can get some people's votes by publicly feeling their pain when it comes to housing costs, and other people's votes by restricting the building of housing, they can have a winning coalition at election time, which is their bottom line.

Economists may point out that the different members of this coalition have conflicting interests that could be better resolved through competition in the marketplace. But how many economists have ever put together a winning coalition?

So long as voters prefer heroes and villains to supply and demand, this game will continue to be played. It is not because supply and demand is too "complex" to understand, but because it is not emotionally satisfying.

In one of those typical San Francisco decisions that makes San Francisco a poster child for the liberal left, the city's Board of Supervisors is moving to block a paint store from renting a vacant building once used by a video rental shop.

That paint store is part of a chain, and chain stores are not liked by a vocal segment of the local population. Chain stores are already banned from some parts of San Francisco, and at least one member of the Board of Supervisors plans to introduce bans on chain stores in other areas.

Chain stores have been disliked for decades, at both local and national levels. Taking advantage of economies of scale that lower their costs of doing business, chain stores are able to charge lower prices than smaller independent stores, and therefore attract customers away from their higher-cost competitors.

The economics of this is certainly not too "complex" to understand. However, politics is not economics, so politicians tend to respond to people's emotional reactions-- and if economic realities stand in the way, then so much the worse for economics.

All sorts of laws and court decisions, going back as far as the 1930s, have tried to prevent the economies of scale that lower costs from being reflected in lower prices that drive high-cost competitors out of business.

Economists may say that benefits always have costs, that there is no free lunch-- but how many votes do economists have?

There was a time when courts would have stopped politicians from interfering with people's property rights by banning chain stores. After all, if whoever owns the vacant video rental store in San Francisco wants to rent it to the paint company, and the paint company is willing to pay the rent, why should politicians be involved in the first place?

However, once the notion of "a living Constitution" became fashionable, the Constitution's protection of property rights has been "interpreted" virtually out of existence by judges.

The biggest losers are not people who own property but people who have to pay higher prices because politicians make it harder for businesses that charge lower prices to come into the community.

Despite the political myth that government is protecting us from big businesses charging monopoly prices, the cold fact is that far more government actions have been taken against businesses that charge low prices than against businesses that charge high prices.

The biggest antitrust cases of a century ago were against the Great Northern Railroad and the Standard Oil Company, both of which charged lower prices than their competitors.

The Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 was called "the anti-Sears, Roebuck law" because it was directed again this and other chains that charged lower prices than smaller retailers could match.

For a long time, there were so-called Fair Trade Laws designed to keep low-cost businesses in general from charging low prices that drive high-cost businesses out of business.

Fortunately, enough sanity eventually prevailed that Fair Trade Laws were repealed. But the emotional needs that such laws met were still there, and today they find an outlet in hostility to Wal-Mart and other "big box" stores-- especially in San Francisco and other bastions of the liberal left.

People have every right to indulge their emotions at their own expense. Unfortunately, through politics, those emotions are expressed in laws and administrative decisions by people who pay no price at all for indulging either their own emotions or the emotions of the people who vote for them.

That is why the Constitution tried to erect barriers to government power, of which property rights were one. But, once judges started saying that "the public interest" over-rides property rights, that left politicians free to call whatever they wanted to do "the public interest."

Neither economics nor property rights are too "complex" to understand. But both get in the way of willful people who seek to deny other people the right to make their own decisions.

Anyone who doesn't like chain stores is free not to shop there. But that is wholly different from saying that they have a right to stop other people from exercising their own freedom of choice. That's not too "complex" to understand.

You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much? Read this:

Boy, am I confused. I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS.

I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. I have included the URL's for verification of all the following facts.

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments.
http://tinyurl.com/zob77
2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.
http://www.cis..org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html
3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.
http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html
4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers.
http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html

9. $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a h alf times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html>

11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border.
http://tinyurl.com/t9sht

12. The National Policy Institute, "estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period."
http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf>
13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin.
http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm>

14. "The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States." http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml

The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR!
Are we THAT stupid?
If this doesn't bother you then just delete the message. If, on the other hand, it does raise the hair on the back of your neck, I hope you forward it to every legal resident in the country including every representative in Washington, D.C. - five times a week for as long as it takes to restore some semblance of intelligence in our policies and enforcement thereof.

" In God We Trust " May God always bless America!