Waking Up To A World Currency - tna - Sept 27 2010

September 27, 2010

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Cover Story

GlobalEconomy

10WakinguptoaWorldcurrencyby Alex Newman — A world currency is not only being debated, but mechanisms are in place to ensure its ascension.

17TheEmergingGlobalFedby Alex Newman — A world fiat currency would create problems that would make our present ones seem tame.

FeatureS

HEalTHcarE

21TheFDa:neitherSafenorEffectiveby Michael Tennant — The dictates of the FDA are so ingrained in society that we seldom question whether they save lives.

norTHamErica

27TexasSidestepby Kelly Holt — The Trans Texas Corridor, though slowed, is continuing.

bookrEviEW

31aGlobal-warmingPrimerby Rebecca Terrell — Climategate covers the science, politics, and goals behind global-warming claims.

HiSTory—PaSTanDPErSPEcTivE

34baseballHeroby Jack Kenny — Ted Williams brought his keen eyesight, quick reflexes, and combative personality to two wars.

THElaSTWorD

44comicbooksFromtheFederalreserveby John F. McManus

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5letterstotheEditor

7 insideTrack

9QuickQuotes

33TheGoodnessofamerica

41Exercisingtheright

42correction,Please!

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vol.26,no.19 September27,2010

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misnomerQuickQuotes (May 10) reported Harry Reid making promises “to a rally of 6,000, most of whom were immigrants.” That’s way off. Maybe there were a dozen curious immi-grants there (tops) but the rest of the crowd were not immigrants: they were invaders. “Immigrant” sounds better, and lets the in-vaders steal part of the good name earned by legal immigrants who didn’t yell in the streets for yet more free goodies. They were too busy learning English, trying to fit into the community, and rebuilding their lives, sometimes from scratch. Whatever came their way, they earned. They were generally no problem to anybody, and they were grate-ful to God for being here.

Dr. K. A. SKAlA

Denver, Colorado

SomeThreatsGetaresponseIn the July 19 issue, Patrick Krey recounted in Exercising the Right how Richard Daley, Mayor of Chicago, threatened to shove a bayonetted rifle “up your butt” when report-er Mike Dumke raised a question at a press conference about the city’s feckless ban on handguns. The incident has a sequel.

It seems that after viewing Daley’s puerile tirade on the “Drudge Report,” Christopher Traynor Fox of San Jose, California, phoned the Chicago Mayor’s office to inquire how he would enjoy suffering the fate he had pre-scribed for Dumke. Fox was promptly arrest-ed by the San Jose police and charged with “making threats against a public official.”

Evidently, there are no laws on the books that prevent politicians from threatening re-porters who ask embarrassing questions.

Geoff SKelton

Westchester, Illinois

WhynotSueTwo?It is interesting that the Obama adminis-tration is suing the State of Arizona for its new immigration policies and not Califor-nia, though California has a similar law on the books. California Penal Code Section 834b says:

(a) Every law enforcement agency in California shall fully cooperate with the United States Immigration and Natu-

ralization Service regarding any person who is arrested if he or she is suspected of being present in the United States in violation of federal immigration laws.

(b) With respect to any such person who is arrested, and suspected of being present in the United States in viola-tion of federal immigration laws, every law enforcement agency shall do the following:

(1) Attempt to verify the legal status of such person as a citizen of the United States, an alien lawfully admitted as a permanent resident, an alien lawfully admitted for a temporary period of time or as an alien who is present in the United States in violation of immi-gration laws. The verification process may include, but shall not be limited to, questioning the person regarding his or her date and place of birth, and entry into the United States, and demanding documentation to indicate his or her legal status.

(2) Notify the person of his or her ap-parent status as an alien who is present in the United States in violation of fed-eral immigration laws and inform him or her that, apart from any criminal jus-tice proceedings, he or she must either obtain legal status or leave the United States.

(3) Notify the Attorney General of California and the United States Immi-gration and Naturalization Service of the apparent illegal status and provide any additional information that may be requested by any other public entity.

Any legislative, administrative, or other action by a city, county, or other legally authorized local governmental entity with jurisdictional boundaries, or by a law enforcement agency, to prevent or limit the cooperation required by subdivision (a) is expressly prohibited.

It’s probably only a problem for the Obama administration when a state really means to enforce its laws.

DenniS BAloG

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty is putting taxpayers’ money where his mouth is. On August 31, he signed an executive order directing state agencies not to apply for any discretionary funds under ObamaCare.

In a statement, the Republican Pawlenty said, “Obamacare is an intrusion by the federal government into personal health care matters and it’s an explosion of federal spending that does noth-ing to make health care more affordable. To the fullest extent possible, we need to keep Obamacare out of Minnesota. This executive order will stop Minnesota’s participation in projects that are laying the groundwork for a federally-controlled health-care system.”

Pawlenty’s order describes ObamaCare as “a dramatic attempt to assert federal command and control over this country’s health care system” that “includes unprecedented federal intrusions into individual liberty,” “massive new spending commitments,” “in-creased taxes and fees,” and “a multitude of programs and dem-onstration projects intended to speed the transition to federally-controlled health care.”

As his order indicates, Pawlenty had earlier refused to par-ticipate in ObamaCare’s early expansion of Medicaid, and the August 31 order is therefore an extension of the state’s nonpar-ticipation in ObamaCare. It is also consistent with the position Pawlenty expressed at a veterans event in St. Paul, as reported by the Associated Press: “Anything that I can do to slow down, limit or negate Obamacare, I’m going to try to do it within reason.”

Minnesota’s Attorney General, Democrat Lori Swanson, fa-vors ObamaCare and has not joined the other State Attorneys General who are suing to overturn the law. On the other hand, seven of those same states are still lining up for their share of ObamaCare funds to cover retired state employees, according to the AP — precisely the opposite of Minnesota’s situation.

Other Minnesota Democrats have criticized Pawlenty’s order, saying it “could cost the state at least tens of millions of dollars in potential grant money,” the AP reports. “By their calculation, Pawlenty already has rejected nearly $1.5 billion, including $1.4 billion to expand Medicaid health care for poor adults and $68 million for a national high-risk pool for hard-to-insure people.”

Pawlenty has been far from consistent in his opposition to fed-eral subsidies. He has accepted subsidies that are not connected with ObamaCare and is considering whether to accept Medicaid assistance that is not part of the legislation. His spokesman, Bruce Gordon, said he is “likely” to take the money.

As a result of such inconsistency, Pawlenty’s opposition to ObamaCare is frequently seen as a political move to assist the Governor in his expected presidential run in 2012. That may be the case. If so, it proves that opposing ObamaCare is considered by Pawlenty to be a winning issue even two years down the road — evidence that the law is deeply unpopular across the country and is not expected to become more popular anytime soon.

Political or not, Pawlenty’s move to avoid a federal takeover of his state’s healthcare system is a welcome addition to the growing state nullification movement.

minnesotaGovernorSaysnotoobamacareSubsidies

President Barack Obama claimed August 31 in an Oval Office ad-dress to the nation that “tonight, I am announcing that the Ameri-can combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.”

But President Obama stressed that armed U.S. intervention in Iraqi affairs is a long way from over. Obama stressed that even after the Iraq-is choose a new coalition government, “there should be no doubt: The Iraqi people will have a strong partner in the United States. Our combat mission is ending, but our commitment to Iraq’s future is not.”

Obama emphasized that he had en-gaged in a plan for “redoubling our efforts to strengthen Iraq’s Security Forces and support its government and

people. That’s what we’ve done.” More specifically, Obama has organized an unprecedented militarization of the State Depart-ment, which has purchased armored personnel carriers and at-tack helicopters as part of its growing “non-combat” role in Iraq. Tens of thousands of supposedly non-combat U.S. soldiers are remaining behind in Iraq, but Obama pledged that “all U.S. troops

will leave by the end of next year.” He added: “As our military draws down, our dedicated civilians — diplomats, aid workers, and advisers — are mov-ing into the lead.” This official transition from warfare in Iraq to welfare in Iraq, which will be managed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, will still include a lot of warfare. The militarized “advis-ers” and “diplomats” will be more nu-merous than at present and will often be toting heavy military equipment.

obamaclaimsEndto“combatoperations”iniraq

Barack Obama

Tim Pawlenty

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Inside Track

www.TheNewAmerican.com 7

If it is true, as Albert Einstein is alleged to have said, that in-sanity consists of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then President Obama and his advi-sors may well be channeling the 20th-century physicist. After all, the President is neither chastened nor enlightened following the monumental failure of his multi-trillion dollar efforts to stimu-late the economy by spending taxpayer money. As his September 6 speech at the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Laborfest attested, he’s going to try it yet again.

In a widely anticipated pre-election initiative, Obama an-nounced a new $50 billion dollar program to rebuild America’s allegedly ailing transportation infrastructure. “Over the next six years,” the President told an enthusiastic union crowd, many of whom would doubtless benefit directly from the welter of new proposed construction projects, “we are going to rebuild 150,000 miles of our roads — enough to circle the world six times. We’re going to lay and maintain 4,000 miles of our railways — enough to stretch coast-to-coast. We’re going to restore 150 miles of run-ways and advance a next generation air-traffic control system to reduce travel time and delays for American travelers.”

The proposal would include the installation of a new high-speed rail system linking Milwaukee with Madison, the state capital, part of an ambitious program to create a national high-speed rail system that would allegedly save time, money, and air quality. And to administer the funds for this latest stimulus boondoggle, a new permanent “infrastructure bank” would be set up “to leverage federal dollars and focus on the smartest invest-ments,” whatever that might mean.

Roads, airlines, and railways aren’t necessarily the unalloyed fiscal benefits they’re chalked up to be. Two generations ago, the French and British governments launched a visionary new program to usher jet transportation into the supersonic age. The much-ballyhooed SST (supersonic transport, better known as the Concorde) turned transatlantic flight into a thrilling, three hour adrenalin rush — for those willing and able to spend more than $10,000 to fly a route that, for a few hours more and in considerably greater comfort and less noise, cost a few hun-dred dollars. The Concorde never came close to living up to its promise, and three decades and countless billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies later, it was finally abandoned after a Con-corde literally went down in flames at Charles de Gaul airport in July 2000.

What about high-speed rail travel? For the record, high-speed trains are a lot of fun to ride on, as anyone who has ridden Amer-ica’s only high-speed rail (the Acela that plies the northeastern corridor from Washington to Boston) will attest. But they’re also very expensive, both to ride and to run, leaving aside the vast expenditures to set them up. It is both cheaper and faster to fly from D.C. to Boston, even factoring in getting to and from the airport. France and Japan have both had vaunted high-speed rail systems for decades, which have become centerpieces in their respective national tourism industries but have done nothing to actually enrich the French and Japanese economies.

Politicians like President Obama love grand public transporta-tion projects — they are eye-catching, visionary, and a very high-profile way of putting people to work with government money (those “Your taxpayer dollars at work” signs, in all their varieties, were invented to garland such projects). But the bottom line is al-ways the bottom line. The fact that we know how to build 10-lane freeways, supersonic transports, high-speed rails, or ultramodern cable-stayed bridges to replace fuddy-duddy highways, conven-tional passenger jets, diesel trains, and suspension bridges does not necessarily mean that we should.

None of which is to say that America must be content with second-tier status. It means that a country’s greatness — ours or any others — has little to do with the ability of its politicians to spend money on public works. The illusion that national great-ness flows from public greatness, as measured by politicians’ generosity with other people’s money, is a misconception at least as old as ancient Babylon.

obama’snewStimulusTarget:infrastructure

In response to the State Department’s Human Rights report that named Arizona as a violator of human rights for its pas-sage of S.B. 1070, Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer wrote Sec-retary of State Hillary Clinton a scathing letter on August 27 calling the reference “downright offensive” as well as “un-constitutional.”

Brewer wrote, “The idea of our own American government submitting the duly enacted laws of a state of the United States

to ‘review’ by the United Nations is internationalism run amok and unconstitutional.”

The report in question included the Justice Department’s legal challenge to S.B. 1070 as an example of how the federal govern-ment is safeguarding human rights. According to the report, “The issue is being addressed in a court action that argues that the federal government has the authority to set and enforce immigration law. That action is ongoing; parts of the law are currently enjoined.” n

GovernorbrewerreactstoU.S.Humanrightsreport

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8 THE NEW AMERICAN • SEpTEMbER 27, 2010

DeathDealttomexicansWhorefusedtoHelpDrugSmugglers“The information we have at this moment is that it was an attempt at forced recruitment. It wasn’t a kidnapping with the intent to get money, but the intention was to force these people to participate in organized crime — with the terrible outcome that we now know.”Mexico’s chief security spokesman, Alejandro Poire, issued his as-sessment after the discovery on August 27 of the bound and blind-folded bodies of 72 massacred migrants who were trying to reach Texas through an area controlled by drug lords.

ProminentiraqiFearsviolenceWhenU.S.ForcesDepart“They are carrying out attacks when the Americans are still here, so just imagine what they can do after the Americans leave.”After insurgents unleashed a wave of attacks against fellow Iraqis, Wael Abdel-Latif, a former law-maker and judge, expressed strong apprehensions about what will happen in his country when all American military forces depart.

novelmethodtoavoidcarTheft“Beware of poisonous snake!”A sign placed in the rear window of a car parked by an anonymous New York City resident succeeded in keeping would-be thieves from stealing the vehicle.

ciaPaymentstoafghanofficialsbecomesanissue“This agency — acting in strict accord with American law — plays an essential role in promoting our nation’s goals in Afghanistan, including security and stability. Speculation about who may help us achieve that is both dangerous and counterproductive.”Neither confirming nor denying reports that the agency’s money has been buying intelligence and sup-port among Afghanistan’s government officials, CIA spokesman George Little addressed the matter after the arrest of Afghan official Mohammed Zia Salehi by the Afghan government.

GloomyForecastabouttheU.S.Economy“The national economy is getting close to the edge of slow growth and slipping into no growth. Busi-nesses are now worried that the consumer won’t reenter the economy. Therefore, why expand?”Northeastern University economist Alan Clayton-Matthews believes that people who are worried about their jobs will be spending less and saving more.

obamaEra’safghanDeathTollnowExceedsbushEra’snumbers“In 86 months, the total number of casualties in Afghanistan was 630 under the Bush command. Under Obama’s weak, waffling, hand-wringing, and navel-gazing command, in just 19 months, the U.S. casu-alty count as of August 31, 2010 is now at a total of 632 and counting.”Columnist Dave Poff pointed out that the casualty numbers have soared during numerous strategy reviews, changes of military leadership, alterations in the rules of engagement, and more.

nevada’s“noneoftheabove”alternativecouldHelpHarryreid“Any vote not for Sharron Angle is a vote for Harry Reid. The Reid camp knows that and that’s why they’re running one of the most negative campaigns in history.”In Nevada, a voter can actually select “None of the Above” when voting. GOP challenger Sharron

Angle’s spokesman, Jerry Stacy, fears that voter disgust prompted by the Reid camp’s negative ads would aid their candidate.

PresidentchidesGoP,Defendsmakingrecessappointments“Until they do, I reserve the right to act within my authority to do what is best for the American people.”Addressing Republican refusal to confirm several of his nominees for federal posts, President Obama announced his intention to continue making appointments when the Senate is not in session so that his nomi-nees do not have to undergo Senate confirmation. n

— compileD By John f. mcmAnuS

Barack Obama

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9

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by Alex Newman

If all the advocates of a world fiat cur-rency (a currency not backed by a pre-cious commodity like gold) were to

scream at once, workers in world capitals, business centers, colleges, and news media may be deafened. And if global financial

elites have their way, America will move quickly toward accepting a planetary fiat currency issued by a world central bank.

Calls for a new world monetary regime are nothing new. After World War II left the world’s financial system in disarray, political leaders and financial gurus met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, from July

1-22, 1944, to plan the post-war economic order. Economist John Maynard Keynes and the British government proposed the creation of a world currency called the “ban-cor,” and the U.S. government proposed a world currency to be known as “unitas.” But for a lot of reasons, mostly American reluc-tance, the schemes never took off. Instead,

THE NEW AMERICAN • SEpTEMbER 27, 201010

GLobaL Economy

World leaders, American politicians, academics, and bankers are not only debating the feasibility of a world currency, they have the mechanisms in place to ensure its ascension.

the Bretton Woods agreement resulted in the U.S. dollar — its value at the time tied to gold — being crowned “the” world re-serve currency. But the dollar’s place as the unchallenged world currency began being displaced with the dollar’s decoupling from gold in 1971. A new system emerged: The dollar retained its position as the world’s reserve currency, but now it was backed not by gold, but only by trust and the fact that oil and other commodities were traded around the world in dollars. Since then, the U.S. government has been growing itself and its power through creating money via the inflationary power of the Federal Re-serve, thus making the dollar increasingly less stable, prompting vigorous calls for a world currency to stabilize world financial markets. That has especially been true as markets have imploded.

leadingthechargeNaturally, prominent globalist leaders and central bankers have been at the forefront of promoting world-currency schemes. And they are confident that the ground-work has been sufficiently laid to achieve the goal. Russian President Dmitry Med-vedev has been among the most vocal supporters. At the G-8 meeting last year, he actually pulled a “united future world currency” coin out of his pocket bearing the words “unity in diversity.” Then, he explained to the audience that it “means they’re getting ready. I think it’s a good sign that we understand how interdepen-dent we are.” In June of this year, he was at it again. “We are making plans for the future. We are talking about creating other reserve currencies, and we are counting on other countries to understand this,” Medvedev told an economic forum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

At the same forum, French President Nicolas Sarkozy concurred, saying world powers “should think together about a new international currency system” at the upcoming G-20 summit. He also said the world’s financial system was “outdated” and should be replaced. “We all need to think about the foundations for a new in-ternational financial system,” he urged. “We’ve been based on the Bretton Woods institutions of 1945, when our American friends were the only superpower. My question is: Are we still in 1945? The an-swer here is, ‘no.’”

Numerous other prominent na-tional leaders have jumped on the international fiat-currency band-wagon as well — too many to list in a short article. But perhaps more importantly, powerful cen-tral bankers around the world are also pushing the issue. Former Fed boss and current chairman of Obama’s “Economic Recov-ery Advisory Board” Paul Volck-er, for example, has long been a strong proponent of a global fiat currency and a global central bank. He is widely reported to have said, “A global economy needs a global currency.” And he has repeatedly called for such a system, hoping to see it emerge during his lifetime.

In China, the “people’s” central-bank boss Zhou Xiaochuan has also frequently called for a new reserve currency. In a 2009 report published on the central bank’s website entitled “Reform the International Monetary System,” Xiaochuan explained that “the desirable goal of reforming the international monetary system, therefore, is to create an international reserve cur-rency that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run, thus removing the inherent de-ficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies.”

When asked about the communist-Chi-nese regime’s idea at a Council on For-

eign Relations event, tax-dodging U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, a regular proponent of global regulation, after acknowledging that he had not read it yet, said, “We’re actually quite open to that.” The dollar immediately plunged. And while Geithner promptly backtracked on his statement, as the saying goes, the cat was already out of the bag.

At a separate Council on Foreign Re-lations event earlier this year, European Central Bank boss Jean-Claude Trichet gave a speech entitled “Global Gover-nance Today.” While different in impor-tant respects from calls to empower the International Monetary Fund as the world central bank, which seems to be the con-sensus view on how to quickly achieve a world currency, Trichet offered a vision that would ultimately lead to the same end. “We need a set of rules, institutions, in-

The BIS, the central bank of central banks (which was almost disbanded for supporting the Nazis), is becoming increasingly powerful, along with global financial regulatory institutions. And for Trichet, this is a positive development.

“People’s”bankofchinabossZhou Xiaochuan, a communist, authored a report last year calling for a world fiat currency issued by the International Monetary Fund.

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formal groupings and cooperation mecha-nisms that we call ‘global governance,’” he said, praising the progress that has already been made in “strengthening the mandate of existing international institutions” but noting that “no market can survive without a set of rules. This is particularly true at the international level.”

In terms of the international monetary system, he applauded the fact that central banks around the world were already “able to take quick, decisive and coordinated ac-tion at short notice.” But “the crisis also showed that gaps in the system of global governance — in terms of both efficiency and legitimacy — have to be filled,” he ex-plained, pointing out that the process was already ongoing.

“Overall, the system is moving deci-sively towards genuine global governance that is much more inclusive,” Trichet said. “The significant transformation of global governance that we are engineering today is illustrated by three examples. First, the emergence of the G20 as the prime group for global economic governance at

the level of ministers, gov-ernors and heads of state or government. Second, the establishment of the Global Economy Meeting of cen-tral bank governors under the auspices of the [Bank for International Settlements (BIS)] as the prime group for the governance of central

bank cooperation. And third, the extension of Financial Stability Board membership to include all the systemic emerging mar-ket economies.” In other words, the BIS, the central bank of central banks (which was almost disbanded for supporting the Nazis), is becoming increasingly power-ful, along with global financial regulatory institutions. And for Trichet, this is a posi-tive development.

He added, “Global governance is of the essence to improve decisively the resil-ience of the global financial system,” and concluded by saying, “The crisis has driv-en an historic change in the framework of global governance. In my view this trans-formation was overdue.” And indeed, the economic crisis has given a major boost to advocates of a world financial and mon-etary regime.

GlobalinstitutionsWith the onset of the global financial cri-sis, which interestingly enough was large-ly brought on by an asset bubble caused via currency manipulation by the United

States’ version of a central bank — the Federal Reserve — international authori-ties have become increasingly vocal about the supposed need for a world fiat currency controlled by a single world central bank. The United Nations and the International Monetary Fund are the most prominent among them. And both of these quasi-gov-ernmental institutions have recently issued reports blasting the dollar and calling for a world fiat currency.

“A new global reserve system could be created, one that no longer relies on the United States dollar as the single major re-serve currency,” said the UN’s World Eco-nomic and Social Survey for 2010. “The dollar has proved not to be a stable store of value, which is a requisite for a stable reserve currency.” The new UN report said that the IMF should be given the authority to print its own fiat currency, claiming that the new system “must not be based on a single currency or even multiple national currencies but instead, should permit the emission of international liquidity — such as [Special Drawing Rights] — to create a more stable global financial system.” SDRs are “assets” issued by the IMF with a value currently based on multiple na-tional fiat currencies.

Late last year, another UN report from a different arm of the institution offered similar analyses and suggestions. “In the discussion about necessary reforms of the international monetary and financial system, the problem of the United States dollar serving as the main international reserve asset has received renewed atten-tion,” said the report, published by the UN Conference on Trade and Development. The paper also pointed to SDRs as the po-tential international reserve currency.

Earlier in 2009, another UN panel also called for talks on setting up a new international monetary system and mov-ing away from the dollar. And the calls are only becoming more frequent and re-spected as time goes on.

Then there is the International Mon-etary Fund, a likely candidate for the po-sition of global central banker, which in some ways has already taken on the role. Like other figures within the organization, IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn — an avowed socialist — has repeatedly called for global regulation and a world currency controlled by the “Fund.”

Once there are fewer currencies and the principal of supranational currency is established, such as has already occurred with the euro, it becomes easier to simply merge them.

internationalmonetaryFund boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn, an admitted socialist, is one of the most well-known advocates of a global fiat currency issued by the institution he leads.

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“One day, the fund might even be called upon to provide a globally issued reserve asset, similar to — but in impor-tant respects different from — the SDR,” he explained in a speech earlier this year, saying it would be “intellectually healthy to explore” the creation of a new IMF-backed world reserve currency before it is “needed.” A few months later, he told the High-Level Conference on the Interna-tional Monetary System that “crisis is an opportunity” and “a new global currency issued by a global central bank, with ro-bust governance and institutional features, could provide a nominal anchor and risk-free asset for the system.”

And it’s not just Strauss-Kahn. In a barely noticed paper published in April of this year, the Fund went even further than the UN or Strauss-Kahn. It outlined the future global fiat currency, to be run by a transformed and newly empowered IMF.

The paper, published by the IMF’s Strategy, Policy, and Review Department and entitled “Reserve Accumulation and International Monetary Stability,” offers very specific proposals which — not sur-prisingly — would involve handing it mas-sive new powers over the global economy and “making the special drawing right (SDR) the principal reserve asset in the [International Monetary System].” And this is merely the short-term policy; the IMF wants to go further, with the creation of a global currency called the bancor.

Of course, even the IMF says its schemes will not likely come about quick-ly or easily. “It is understood that some of the ideas discussed are unlikely to mate-rialize in the foreseeable future absent a dramatic shift in appetite for international cooperation,” it says in the report. Some analysts have suggested a war with Iran or a crash of China’s economy could trigger such a shift.

TrendTowardmonetaryUnionsMonetary unions, where a collection of national governments surrender their power over money to international institu-tions, are popping up around the world. In recent decades, there has been a declining number of currencies as more countries abandon their own currencies to use a multinational currency, such as the euro.

Africa already contains a patchwork of regional supranational currencies, includ-

ing one in West Africa, another in Central Africa, and a group of countries that use the South African Rand. A plan to intro-duce a continental currency — sometimes referred to as the “afro” — controlled by the already existing African Union’s Af-rican Central Bank is set for completion in less than two decades. In Asia, calls for a regional monetary union are grow-ing stronger. Arabian nations, through the Gulf Cooperation Council, are planning their own common currency right now.

In closer proximity to the United States, a group of Caribbean nations formed the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union. All use the East Caribbean dollar. More re-cently, a number of leftist Latin Ameri-can regimes created the SUCRE under the leadership of socialist despot Hugo Chavez. And a South American currency is currently in the works. Significant num-bers of nations have also unilaterally aban-doned their own currencies and switched to the dollar, such as Ecuador and El Sal-vador. In Europe, while not officially join-ing the Eurozone, numerous small coun-tries have also switched to the euro. And this is exactly what many proponents of a global fiat currency are promoting as a means to that end. Once there are fewer currencies and the principal of suprana-tional currency is established, such as has already occurred with the euro, it becomes easier to simply merge them.

A 2007 article for the Council on For-

eign Relations’ magazine Foreign Affairs entitled “The End of National Currency” offered some insight into the strategy being pursued. Benn Steil, the powerful group’s director of international econom-ics, suggests a very specific proposal: “Governments should replace national currencies with the dollar or the euro or, in the case of Asia, collaborate to produce a new multinational currency over a com-parably large and economically diversified area.... Most of the world’s smaller and poorer countries would clearly be best off unilaterally adopting the dollar or the euro, which would enable their safe and rapid integration into global financial markets. Latin American countries should dollar-ize; eastern European countries and Tur-key, euroize.”

And that is precisely the argument of the most prominent global currency en-thusiasts. Columbia economics Professor Robert Mundell, who could not be reached by press time, is one of them. He is a No-bel-prize winner, a key advisor to the com-munist Chinese regime, and also known as the “father” of the euro. And he argues that the world should move toward a new global currency system called the “DEY” — a “basket” of dollars, euros, and yen controlled and issued by a global central bank, possibly a newly empowered IMF. Eventually, the architecture would lead to a truly global fiat currency.

“My approach is rather to start out with

PresidentoftheEuropeancentralbankJean-Claude Trichet is one of the primary engineers of the emerging global-governance structure and an important coordinator of global monetary policy.

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arrangements for stabilizing exchange rates, and move from there to a global currency. It would start off from the situa-tion as it is at present and gradually move it toward the desired solution. We could start off with the three big currencies in the world, the dollar, euro, and yen, and with specified weights, make a basket of them into a unit that could be called the DEY,” Mundell explained in a 2005 speech called “The case for a world currency.” “The DEY could then become the platform on which to build a global currency, which I shall call the INTOR.”

His “basic plan” for the world currency would be implemented in three stages, he said. First, stabilization of exchange rates. Next, a monetary union under the DEY consisting of most of the world’s econo-my. And finally, the creation of the INTOR. While Mundell acknowledged that it might be difficult, he expressed optimism about the currency’s prospects, saying, “The next big crisis might be the occasion for a re-convening of a Bretton Woods type confer-ence to establish the conditions for a new international monetary system.” With the United States looking at a likely second round of economic turmoil and its dollar becoming increasingly unstable as interest payments on the national debt take up an ever larger part of all taxes collected, such a “crisis” is probably closer than Ameri-cans would like to imagine.

Other prominent advocates agree with the Mundell strategy for achieving a world currency managed by a global central bank. “We’ll probably get there by the merger of monetary unions,” explained Morrison Bonpasse, founder and president of the Sin-gle Global Currency Association and author of The Single Global Currency: Common Cents for the World, in an interview with The New AmericAN. “But there are several

possible routes. One is to con-tinue the current regionaliza-tion of currencies, to include North America, and creation, expansion and merger of monetary unions; and then combine those currencies into one. Another is for smaller countries to continue to ‘ize’ their nations’ legal tender, as in ‘dollarize’ and ‘euroize.’ … Once the ‘tipping point’ is reached where one currency

supports approximately 40-50 percent of the world’s GDP, the movement will accel-erate to anoint that currency as the single global currency.” The organization’s target date: 2024.

Clearly, the move toward regional cur-rencies is picking up traction, especially during this decade.

Already EmergingSome argue that the global central bank and all that it entails are already taking solid form or, worse, already here.

“What the IMF is doing is, they’ve positioned themselves and are actually beginning the process of issuing debt for the first time,” explained James Rickards, senior managing director for market intel-ligence and co-head of threat finance and market intelligence at Omnis, a leading consulting firm. “So what that means is

the IMF is acting like a central bank be-cause it’s leveraging its balance sheet,” he told The New AmericAN, saying SDRs could replace the dollar and become the international reserve currency in two to five years. And it’s already going on. “In terms of paper currency, a leveraged bal-ance sheet, and the creation of liquidity out of thin air, the IMF is clearly the way they’re going because, as I said, they’ve already done it.... It’s not speculation, it’s actually happening,” he said, noting that the shift away from dollars has already started and would accelerate.

The IMF has indeed taken some ex-traordinary steps recently. Last year, for example, for the first time in the Fund’s history, it issued bonds denominated in SDRs. The Chinese regime promptly gob-bled up $50 billion worth, with the IMF saying in a statement that the sale “offers China a safe investment instrument” and that it was part of a broader plan to “boost the Fund’s capacity to help its membership — particularly the developing and emerg-ing market countries — weather the global financial crisis, and facilitate an early re-covery of the global economy.” And of course, there’s still more.

“The other thing the IMF has done — not for the first time, really for the second time, but the first time in quite a large size — is to issue SDRs,” explained Rickards. “The IMF is issuing its own paper currency,” and,

At recent G20 confabs, the centralization of the world’s monetary system has indeed been a hot topic. Headlines around the world announced the imminent arrival of a “new world order,” a global currency, a world central bank, and a planetary monetary-policy regime.

Finance Ministers and central bank bosses pose at the International Monetary Fund, the most likely candidate to become a world central bank. In many ways, it has already taken on the role.

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like all fiat currencies, it’s backed by noth-ing, Rickards said. “I view all of these as pilot programs. In other words, they’re kind of testing the plumbing.... Now the IMF is positioned to — in effect, and I think this is the plan — to become a global central bank which can issue its own currency called SDRs, leverage its balance sheet through borrowing, and then create assets by making loans and investing in securities, all under the auspices of the IMF executive committee, which is basically the same set of people as the G20.”

At recent G20 confabs, the centraliza-tion of the world’s monetary system has indeed been a hot topic. Headlines around the world announced — boldly and with good cause — the imminent arrival of a “new world order,” a global currency, a world central bank, and a planetary mon-etary-policy regime. The early 2009 G20 declaration, for example, said, “We have agreed to support a general SDR alloca-tion which will inject $250 billion into the world economy and increase global liquidity.” In simpler terms, printing inter-national fiat money.

Now, the regulatory regime is going global, too. And fast. The same G20 meeting also led to the Financial Stabil-ity Forum being transformed into the Fi-nancial Stability Board, usurping financial regulatory authority traditionally held by national central banks around the world. The new “board” is rapidly becoming a global financial regulator as its mandate expands to include overseeing action to address vulnerabilities in the financial system, setting guidelines, and even man-aging “contingency planning for cross-border crisis management.”

mediaSupportNo strategy for dramatic, unpopular change would be complete without a pub-lic media campaign. So, of course, among the prominent voices throwing their weight behind a global fiat currency and a global central bank are some of the most influential media outlets in the world. Al-ready in 1988, The Economist wrote an article predicting a global currency within 30 years, saying, “This means a big loss of economic sovereignty, but the trends that make the [new hypothetical global cur-rency] so appealing are taking that sover-eignty away in any case.”

A decade later, the New York Times took up the issue with a piece from prominent CFR insider and global central bank pro-moter Jeffrey Garten calling for a “global Fed.” After praising the development of various unconstitutional institutions in the United States, most notably the Fed-eral Reserve, Garten wrote, “The world needs an institution that has a hand on the economic rudder when the seas become stormy. It needs a global central bank.” Ten years after that, Garten penned a piece for the Financial Times, once again advocating “the establishment of a Global Monetary Authority.”

In a 2008 Newsweek article entitled “We Need a Bank of the World,” Garten claimed, “The financial crisis is global, and only an international central bank can deal with it.” The piece called for world leaders to “begin laying the groundwork for establishing a global central bank” be-cause “the Fed no longer has the capability to lead singlehandedly.”

The year after that article, Garten was at it again, this time in Businessweek. “If crit-ics could suspend the hyperventilating for a few minutes, they’d realize a global cen-tral bank is becoming a necessity in today’s complex, interconnected world economy,” he wrote. The piece also cites Tim “Tur-boTax” Geithner, who said, “We need a common global solu-tion to these markets, not separate regional solutions.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Post ran a 2009 story prais-ing the International Monetary Fund’s

transformation into a bank of the world. “Bowing to a new economic world order, the IMF would grant fresh powers to the likes of China, India and Brazil. It would have vastly expanded authority to act as a global banker to governments rich and poor,” wrote Post staff writer Anthony Faio-la. “And with more flexibility to effectively print its own money, it would have the abil-ity to inject liquidity into global markets in a way once limited to major central banks.” The article also mentioned “the IMF’s transformation into a veritable United Na-tions for the global economy” and quoted various experts praising the developments.

Even the supposedly more free-market-friendly press in the United States has also backed the scheme. “World money, with a world central bank, seems a next logi-cal step,” wrote Wall Street Journal editor emeritus Robert Bartley in a 2003 opinion piece for the newspaper. “A world money would be an extraordinary boon to inter-national stability.” He was writing from Mundell’s monetary conference at his castle in Italy.

The world elite is on a mission. Its plan to impose a global fiat monetary regime on humanity is well under way. And if serious resistance is not mounted soon, the new world monetary order could be just around the corner. n

EXTracoPiESavailablEAdditional copies of this issue of the

new AmericAn are available at quantity-discount prices. To place your order, visit www.shopjbs.org or see the card between pages 34-35.

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Themainstreammedia in the U.S. and around the world have been busily preparing humanity for the supposedly imminent and proper emergence of a global monetary regime.


by Alex Newman

The Federal Reserve has been a nightmare for the American peo-ple. It inflates the money supply,

thereby devaluing already-existing money and placing a massive hidden tax on the people via rising prices. It also uses its monopoly power to cause interest rates to go up or down, usurping the rightful

place of the market and causing massive malinvestment and generally an improper and unproductive allocation of resources. The Fed also causes the boom-and-bust cycle through its manipulations of the currency and credit supply. It serves as the government’s partner in perpetually expanding the “welfare-warfare state,” allowing the state to spend far more than it could ever hope to reasonably raise

through direct taxation. And of course, the fact that all federal reserve notes enter the economy as debt with interest attached (but never created) has led to a situation where it is literally mathemati-cally impossible to pay off the debt. In sum, the consequences of such a system have been disastrous for average Ameri-cans — hence the growing calls to audit and even end the Fed.

But now, imagine such a system at the global level. And it isn’t just a mental ex-ercise; the global central bank is already emerging. As bad as the Fed has been for America — and indeed the world — a similar system at the international level would be far worse. Disaster might even be an understatement.

internationalliquidityandinflationOne of the most serious threats posed by a global central bank and world fiat currency is the fact that it would allow the emerging planetary regime to print its own money and finance its activities independently. That means wealth could be secretly siphoned away from all of hu-manity to pay for armies, tax collectors, courts, bureaucracies, law enforcement, wealth redistribution, propaganda, and much more. With no limits. But to advo-cates of such a system, that is one of its primary benefits.

“A super-sovereign reserve currency not only eliminates the inherent risks of credit-based sovereign currency, but also makes it possible to manage global liquid-ity. A super-sovereign reserve currency managed by a global institution could be used to both create and control the global liquidity,” wrote Chinese central-bank boss Zhou Xiaochuan in his public paper calling for a world currency. “The central-ized management of its member countries’ reserves by the Fund will be an effective measure to promote a greater role of the SDR [Special Drawing Rights, the Inter-national Monetary Fund’s first effort at a world currency] as a reserve currency.” Of course, communists have always support-ed control of “liquidity” (Karl Marx was a strong advocate of central banks with a

Many of the world’s financial elites are excitedly pushing for a world fiat currency, but such a system would create problems that would make our present ones seem tame.

The Emerging Global Fed

Thedangersofmoneyprinting at the national level are bad enough, as evidenced by Zimbabwe, where the “money” eventually became totally worthless.

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monopoly on currency and credit). But to people who care about freedom and pros-perity, the communists’ support should be a huge red flag.

The United Nations has also backed global currency proposals for the same reason. In a report earlier this year calling for the end of the dollar’s status as a re-serve currency and a new monetary regime controlled by the International Monetary Fund, the UN’s World Economic and So-cial Survey for 2010 points out that, “Such emissions of international liquidity could also underpin the financing of investment in long-term sustainable development.” The term “sustainable development” — especially when used by the UN — is often used to refer to stronger central planning, population reduction, more land in gov-ernment hands, and other ideas repugnant to average Americans and the U.S. Con-stitution. Other schemes for “international liquidity” could be even worse.

Hiding behind the passive voice, a sepa-rate report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development adds in the concept of wealth redistribution: “It has been sug-gested that in order for the SDR to become the main form of international liquidity and means of reserve holding, new SDR allocations should be made according to

the needs of countries.” It then promotes worldwide central planning to “stabilize global output growth” by issuing more SDRs or retiring them as the emerging global government deems necessary. As it stands, wealth redistribution around the world is bad enough. Surrendering that power to a global institution would be a nightmare.

In its report published earlier this year, the IMF also recently came out in favor of allowing it to print its own money to provide “international liquidity.” “A global currency, bancor, issued by a global central bank would be designed as a stable store of value that is not tied exclusively to the conditions of any particular economy,” the paper says. “The global central bank could serve as a lender of last resort, providing needed systemic liquidity in the event of adverse shocks and more automatically than at present.” In laymen’s terms, the IMF, with its power to “emit liquidity” out of thin air, would be empowered to “bail out” companies, governments, and whomever it wished. If you thought the Fed handing out trillions of dollars to the big banks and other insiders was bad, just wait until a global central bank exercises that power.

Allowing the emerging global govern-

ment to supply its own money would free it from the constraints of having to raise money through national contributions or direct international taxation. But of course, printing all of this new “liquidity” and financing all of its ambitious projects would be inflationary by definition. And this inevitably would represent a massive problem.

Even John Maynard Keynes, the origi-nal proponent of the world currency called “bancor,” understood the concept well. In 1919, he wrote in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, “By a con-tinuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”

To understand the effects, one can look to history and examine examples such as what occurred in the Weimar Republic of Germany, where the money supply was inflated to such an extent, to finance gov-ernment spending and war debt, that Ger-mans actually found their money more valuable to burn as fuel than to use to purchase items. Or, in more recent years, the tragedy of hyperinflation in Zimba-bwe, where inflation exceeded millions of percent per year and it could cost a person billions of dollars for a loaf of bread, provides a more current warning. Even in America — with a comparably stable currency up until now — inflation has wreaked havoc on the economy and the lives of citizens, as we have become a country where mothers and fathers must both work to make ends meet. And these all happened in a world where there was still a check on unlimited inflation of fiat money — the fact that citizens could quit using it and purchase other curren-cies that were not losing their value as quickly. But under a global fiat monetary regime, there would be no such option.

Economists who have been proven cor-rect over the decades about the economic consequences of creating money out of thin air are already sounding the alarm. “A world paper currency and world central bank would heighten the moral hazard and lead to a global inflationary regime such as we’ve never seen,” noted Lew Rockwell, the chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. That is, the “easy” money and credit would cause people to borrow and spend way beyond their means, creating

out-of-controlmoneycreation in the United States is leading to a loss of purchasing power that could eventually destroy the dollar’s position as the world reserve currency, ultimately leading to a truly global fiat currency.

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an unprecedented global bubble that would at some point inevitably burst. “There would be no escape from political control at that point.”

And the consequences would be dire. “Inflation tears apart the whole fabric of stable economic relationships,” explained the legendary free-market economist Henry Hazlitt. “It leads men to demand totalitarian controls. It ends invariably in bitter disillusion and collapse.”

closerintegrationandTotalcontrolExisting monetary unions are often seen as the model for a global currency by ad-vocates of such a system. But surrendering control over money to supranational insti-tutions has consequences, as the people of the Eurozone are discovering. For one, according to data compiled by the Euro-pean Central Bank, economic growth has slowed dramatically in countries using the euro since the introduction of that single currency — a phenomenon not observed in other areas of the world.

But more importantly, the goal of keep-ing the monetary union intact is leading to ever greater fiscal and political integra-tion as rules are harmonized and author-ity continues shifting from nations toward European institutions. During the height of the crisis in Greece, other European governments were forced to bail out the Greek regime over fears that it could bring down the euro. But on top of that, Euro-zone heads of state and government got together and used the crisis as an excuse for pushing deeper integration and the im-position of “economic governance” at the European level.

“We commit to promote a strong coor-dination of economic policies in Europe. We consider that the European Council must improve the economic governance of the European Union and we propose to increase its role in economic coordina-tion and the definition of the European Union growth strategy,” announced the euro-area heads of state and government in a statement. “The current situation demonstrates the need to strengthen and

complement the existing framework to en-sure fiscal sustainability in the euro zone and enhance its capacity to act in times of crises.”

Around the same time, IMF boss Dom-inique Strauss-Kahn joined the calls for deeper integration in Europe, offering IMF funds with strings attached. “The launch-ing of the euro was only a first step,” he explained. “You can’t have a single cur-rency without having a more coordinated economic policy.” And indeed, such eco-nomic control will also lead to more politi-cal control — just as we have seen with the transformation of the European Common Market into the European Union.

Obviously, if the euro is the model for a world currency, the same phenomenon would occur at the world level. That would mean closer integration among the nations of the world, the vast majority of which are ruled by totalitarian regimes of vari-ous varieties. A world fiat currency, then, would be the surest way to accelerate the development of a true global government and the accompanying de-struction of national sover-eignty. But to planetary cur-rency enthusiasts, that is a non-issue.

Noting that there would be critics of the development of a world central bank, es-pecially in America, Council on Foreign Relations insider and global fiat currency pro-moter Jeffrey Garten points out in an article for News-

week, “Among their many charges, critics will protest the establishment of ‘world government.’ But we have a World Trade Organization with legally binding pow-ers over trade disputes. We have a World Health Organization for communicable disease with the ability to quarantine en-tire countries. And a World Court func-tions today that has considerable legal and moral clout.” Dismissing critics protesting the establishment of a world government by pointing out that it already exists in ru-dimentary form is hardly likely to pacify those critics.

But what would a global currency re-ally mean aside from the destruction of the dollar and the U.S. economy? “A global central bank would be a disaster,” financial guru Bob Chapman, editor of the Interna-tional Forecaster, told the new Ameri-cAn. “It means the acceptance of world slavery.” Chapman also pointed out that the present international monetary system was being deliberately destroyed precisely to bring about a global currency like the

A world fiat currency would allow the emerging planetary regime to print its own money and finance its activities independently. That means wealth could be secretly siphoned away from all of humanity to pay for armies, tax collectors, courts, bureaucracies, etc.


Theeuro, the world’s most prominent regional currency, provides an obvious example of what would happen under a global currency — calls for closer political and economic integration among nations.

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bancor. “It’s just not fiscal and monetary policy. It is every facet of your life that these elitists want to control.” And they’re moving fast toward that goal.

In addition to printing money, the emerging global central bank and its affili-ates are already usurping other powers tra-ditionally exercised at the national level. In his Newsweek article, Garten calls for the new planetary central bank to be the “lead regulator” of all sorts of financial institu-tions, monitor risks, push national authori-ties to “modify their policies,” coordinate national “stimulus programs,” orchestrate a “global-stimulus plan,” force taxpayers around the world to bail out companies, and even act as a bankruptcy court. The IMF, in its own report, called for global “imbalance” taxes, capital controls, and a true world financial regulatory regime. A lot of that is already coming into being, but as the new monetary order develops, the agenda will only accelerate.

And as if all that wasn’t bad enough, there is no accountability for this newly empowered IMF. Jim Rickards, the director of market intelligence for Omnis, explained that, while the IMF has articles of associa-tion and some governance rules, the true power structure behind it is the G20, which is “completely unaccountable.”

options,SolutionsAs the international monetary crisis un-folds with a collapsing dollar, there will need to be some sort of reforms. The ques-tion is which ones. Instead of “currency reform” coming “from the marble palaces of the monetary elites,” economist Lew Rockwell of the Mises Institute points out, “private currencies traders the world over could, on their own, give rise to a new currency rooted in gold and traded by means of digital media.” This would be far superior for numerous reasons, he argues. “Under a gold standard, the physical metal is the limit and the market is the master. Under a global paper system, the paper provides no limit whatsoever and the poli-ticians are the masters.”

And indeed, while the elite pushes its fiat world currency, entrepreneurs have already been working on making gold a sort of currency without the need for gov-ernment dictates. “Money was invented in pre-history by people interacting peace-fully with one another to help improve

their situation by trading. Money is not an invention of government,” explained James Turk, founder of GoldMoney, a company holding over a billion dollars in assets that allows customers to purchase, store, and trade precious metals. “There is a better solution. It was the one created by Sir Isaac Newton and given to King Wil-liam III. We now call it the classical gold standard, which lasted from circa 1700 to 1914. If governments are to issue cur-rency, it must be tied to gold. It is this link that provides essential discipline needed to rein in the aspirations of politicians to spend money, even money the government doesn’t have,” he told the new Ameri-cAn, adding that the bankers pushing for a world fiat currency “will do everything they can to continue this special privilege that they have assumed for themselves.”

Omnis’ Rickards also has some ideas about how America can put a freeze on the emergence of the global paper cur-rency: cuts in taxes and spending; higher interest rates to strengthen the dollar; and, eventually, getting back on the gold standard. “The U.S. is in the best posi-tion to go back to the gold standard,” he explained, pointing out that, with an estimated 8,000 tons, America has more gold than any other country. “The first country that goes to the gold standard will — in effect — dominate the world of finance because they will have the currency that everybody wants.... Would you rather have a gold-backed dollar or a

paper SDR?” What’s missing right now, he said, is just the political will to do it.

“What you’re going to see over the next few years is a global struggle between the forces who want to create new forms of paper and just give it a different name and a different issuer and continue to flood the world with paper liquidity and keep the game going on the one hand, versus people who will recognize that the only true form of money is gold and will start bidding up the price of gold against the dollar,” Rickards predicted.

John McManus, president of The John Birch Society, has a similar view of how to rectify the current situation without mov-ing toward an international central bank to manage a global fiat currency. “If the currency is a commodity like gold or sil-ver, it does not have to be managed. The free market place will manage it,” he ex-plains in Dollars and Sense, a short video presentation on the monetary system. “Money should be a commodity valuable to all people; and there’s no management needed.”

It is ironic that the likely imminent collapse of the world’s current fiat “re-serve currency” is being used as excuse to implement a global fiat currency. But it is extremely serious. Escaping the elites’ clutches would become almost impossible as wealth is steadily transferred from hu-manity to the banking oligarchy and its ever-expanding global government. And so the scheme must be prevented. n

Goldandsilvercoins have traditionally been considered a sort of global currency because they have inherent value that cannot be secretly confiscated by authorities.

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by Michael Tennant

Once upon a time, so the story goes, the American pharmaceu-tical industry was a “wild West”

in which greedy, unscrupulous snake-oil salesmen preyed on unsuspecting citizens. Average Americans, in the same tale, were incapable of sifting through the claims of drug purveyors and of determining which drugs were both safe and effective, and thus were suffering and dying in droves at the hands of these conniving profiteers. The happy ending to the story is that the federal government, in response to pub-lic outcries for salvation, stepped in and forced all drug manufacturers to prove their products were safe and effective

before they could sell them; henceforth, Americans could be certain that no drugs would ever harm them again.

Would that it were so simple. In fact, say economists Daniel B. Klein, Ph.D., and Alexander Tabarrok, Ph.D., not only is the back story in that familiar yarn sorely lacking an historical basis, but the very idea that federal premarket approval of drugs is beneficial is also greatly in doubt.

Klein and Tabarrok are the authors of an Independent Institute project called FDAReview.org that examines the ques-tion “Is the FDA safe and effective?” The two men conclude that it is neither, writing that “FDA control over drugs and devices has large and often overlooked costs that almost certainly exceed the benefits” and

that “FDA regulation of the medical indus-try has suppressed and delayed new drugs and devices, and has increased costs, with a net result of morbidity and mortality.”

They do not, however, place the major-ity of the blame on the FDA itself but rath-er on the legislation that created the FDA and has steadily expanded its duties and powers. The FDA’s initial responsibilities were small and relatively innocuous; as Congress has piled more mandates onto the agency, its delays have increased and its effectiveness has decreased.

TheEvolutionofregulationKlein and Tabarrok begin their study with a detailed overview of the history of feder-al drug regulation. They write that “before the twentieth century there was no direct federal regulation of drugs or other con-sumer products,” yet somehow Americans managed to survive and prosper just the same.

While it’s true that the pharmaceutical industry was also relatively small prior to 1900, with most drugs being mixed by hand at local pharmacies, pharmacists and doc-tors had already undertaken to improve the safety and quality of the drugs being sold to consumers. For example, in 1820 the U.S. Pharmacopoeia was created. “A private, voluntary undertaking of physicians, phar-macists and colleges of pharmacy, the USP presented a formulary of compositions and listed chemical compounds, crude drugs, fixed oils, and other substances typically kept by a pharmacist,” explain the authors. “Later the USP listed tests for determin-ing purity. Leading pharmacists regularly revised the USP as new and better drugs, compositions, and tests were discovered and created.” The American Medical Asso-ciation and the American Pharmaceutical Association were formed; the latter began publishing the National Formulary, whose function is “to provide standards for drugs omitted from the USP and to serve as a proving ground for drugs eventually trans-ferred to the USP,” in 1888. In short, long

The dictates of the FDA are so ingrained in society that we seldom question whether they save lives. In actuality, studies show that FDA rules lead to increased deaths.

TheFDa:Neither Safe nor Effective

Publicawareness: In 2010, the Johnson & Johnson Company voluntarily recalled multiple lots of Tylenol and other medications because of complaints of a musty, moldy odor in some Tylenol products and inexact ingredient amounts, causing consumers to shop elsewhere.

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before the FDA was even a gleam in Uncle Sam’s eye, the pharmaceutical industry was regulating itself.

Klein and Tabarrok point out that crises have played a large part in Washington’s increasing control over the pharmaceuti-cal industry. The very first significant fed-eral drug regulation, the Biologics Act of 1902, was passed in the wake of a vaccine contamination scare. The act, write the economists, “required that federal govern-ment grant premarket approval for every biological drug and for the process and fa-cility producing such drugs. Never before had such premarket control existed in the United States.”

Four years later the Pure Food and Drugs Act was passed, again as a result of a crisis mentality, though this time the crisis was largely imagined. Between muckraking journalism (for example, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle) and the publicity stunts of federal Bureau of Chemistry Chief Harvey Washington Wiley (who had a tendency to seek federal regulations to benefit his cro-nies in the business world), the public was led to believe that they were in grave dan-ger of contaminated food and drugs.

The resulting law still did not give the federal government the power to prevent drugs (other than biological drugs as provided for in the 1902 law) from com-ing to market. In fact, it largely affirmed the industry’s self-policing, recognizing the “U.S. Pharmacopoeia and National Formulary as official standards for the strength, quality, and purity of drugs and

for the tests to make such determinations,” according to Klein and Tabarrok. It also prohibited “misbranding” of drugs, de-fined as failing to indicate the quantity or proportion of certain potentially danger-ous or addictive drugs.

Klein and Tabarrok thus conclude: “For consumers, the main result of the 1906 law was not to restrict choices but to pro-vide more information.... Because the feds could not wield coercive premarket power, the Chemistry Bureau and industry trusted each other and cooperated to improve drug manufacturing.”

The regulatory duties of the Chemistry Bureau having been transferred to the Food and Drug Administration by 1930, the next step was to increase the FDA’s power even further. Since, as Klein and Tabarrok note, “the Constitution does not give the federal government any power to regulate drugs,” the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 abused the interstate commerce clause to permit federal regulation of drugs. The law required manufacturers to file a New Drug Application (NDA) with the FDA for each new drug they wanted to bring to market, after which it was up to the FDA either to approve or to deny the application, al-though, say the authors, “the default posi-tion was approval … and as a result the costs of the FDA to the public were kept low.” In addition, the law “had the effect of creating a new class of prescription-only drugs” and “expanded the FDA’s powers over medical devices.”

After that the mandates and accompa-

nying regulations just kept coming. Nearly all of the laws expanded the FDA’s mis-sion, most especially the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendments (passed in the wake of the thalidomide tragedy), which autho-rized the FDA to require proof of efficacy for all new drugs before they could go to market. A few attempted to rectify some of the unintended consequences of earlier legislation. The resulting centralization of decision-making for the pharmaceuti-cal and medical-device industries reduced patients’ and doctors’ choices and greatly delayed the bringing of new products to market.

regulatoryHarmKlein and Tabarrok spend a significant amount of time going into detail about the harm that the FDA’s approval process visits on ailing Americans. They point out that there are at least two negative effects of the extensive testing the FDA requires:

First, it delays the arrival of superior drugs. During the delay, some people who would have lived end up dying. Second, additional testing require-ments raise the costs of bringing a new drug to market; hence, many drugs that would have been devel-oped are not, and all the people who would have been helped, even saved, are not.

In addition, because FDA approval is mandatory, industry and medicine must heed FDA standards regard-less of their relevance, efficiency, and appropriateness. Not all testing is equally beneficial. The FDA appa-ratus mandates testing that, in some cases, is not useful or not appropri-ately designed. The case against the FDA is not that premarket testing is unnecessary but that the costs and benefits of premarket testing would be better evaluated and the trade-offs better navigated in a voluntary, com-petitive system of drug development.

As mentioned above, the Kefauver-Harris Amendments of 1962 were something of a watershed in the history of federal drug regulation. Now drug companies had to prove not only that their products were safe but also that they were effective.

Yet both safety and efficacy vary with

Savings: Multiple studies put the cost of developing a single new drug at $800 million. Significant drug savings could be had if premarket testing could be done through private companies. Consumers’ protection would derive from lawsuits if drugmakers lie about a drug’s dangers.

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the individual patient and his circum-stances. A drug to treat one ailment may be safe for an otherwise healthy person but could be deadly for someone who is already suffering a variety of other mala-dies. Furthermore, a person who is suffer-ing from a terminal illness may be willing to bear the risk of a drug the FDA deems unsafe in hopes of curing his illness or at least improving the quality of his remain-ing life. Efficacy, too, comes down to an individual situation. Some drugs work on some people and not on others, while oth-ers, perhaps not as efficacious as the FDA deems necessary for approval, are suffi-ciently helpful to some individuals (or at least better than no treatment at all).

The authors cite a 1973 study by Sam Peltzman to demonstrate that the Kefau-ver-Harris Amendments have done little good and much harm. Peltzman developed a model that forecast the annual number of new drug introductions both pre- and post-1962. The model worked beautifully pre-1962, tracking the actual number of new drug introductions quite accurately. However, once the 1962 amendments went into practice, the model, using the same criteria that had succeeded prior to 1962, consistently predicted a much higher number of new drug introductions than actually occurred. It can be inferred that, in the absence of Kefauver-Harris,

many more drugs would have been introduced each year than actually were. In fact, write Klein and Tabar-rok, “the average number of new drugs introduced pre-1962 (forty) was also much larger than the post-1962 average (sixteen).” Thus, they conclude that “the 1962 Amendments caused a significant drop in the introduction of new drugs.”

Furthermore, because the costs of FDA regulations are the same regardless of whether a drug is intended to treat a com-mon ailment or a rare one, say the econo-mists, “millions of Americans have few or no therapies available to treat their dis-eases because of increased costs of drug development brought about by stringent FDA ‘safety and efficacy’ requirements.” Although Congress tried to remedy this situation with still more tinkering with the system via the Orphan Drug Act of 1983, the good doctors suggest that it would even “be better to reduce or eliminate FDA regulations for all drugs and patient populations.”

Klein and Tabarrok attempt to quan-tify the number of lives lost owing to FDA delays and the reduction in new drug in-troductions. They write that “Gieringer (1985) estimates the loss of life from delay

alone to be in the hundreds of thousands.” Meanwhile, the extra time required for ap-proval by the U.S. government versus Eu-ropean governments, known as drug lag, has resulted in “hundreds of thousands” of deaths over the years. Therefore, they say, the “conclusion is clear: the FDA is respon-sible for more lives lost than lives saved.”

They also take on the issue of “off-label” uses of drugs, i.e., prescribing a drug for uses other than those for which the FDA approved it. These off-label uses are discovered through private-sector test-ing, research, publications, and so on, not through the centralized FDA process. Nevertheless, doctors and patients are more than willing to make use of these non-FDA-approved treatments. Thus, the authors conclude that the “off-label mar-ket … provides a good idea of the benefits to be had from reducing FDA control over approval decisions.” Moreover, they add: “Efficacy requirements should be dropped altogether!” These fellows don’t mince words.

They are similarly direct in summariz-ing their findings with regard to the harm caused by FDA regulations, saying, “All the systematic evidence goes against the coercive FDA apparatus.”

One might at this point ask why it takes the FDA so long to approve new drugs. The obvious answer is simple bureau-cratic inertia, and that certainly explains some of it. However, the larger reason is that approving a drug that is later found to be unsafe leads to bad publicity for the agency, while failing to approve (or delay-ing approval of) a valuable drug generates no such news. After all, few people outside the FDA will know if a worthwhile new drug is delayed or never sees the light of day, but everyone will find out if an FDA-approved drug causes illnesses or deaths. As a result, the tendency among regulators is always to err greatly on the side of cau-tion. The authors quote an anecdote from

A person who is suffering from a terminal illness may be willing to bear the risk of a drug the FDA deems unsafe in hopes of curing his illness or at least improving the quality of his remaining life.

FDaapproval: Celebrex and Vioxx were almost pulled from the market because their use increases the risks of serious complications — such as heart attacks and strokes. The FDA’s approval gave consumers a false impression that the drugs were at least as safe as their competitors.

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physician, Hoover Institution fellow, and former FDA employee Henry I. Miller that perfectly encapsulates this mindset:

In the early 1980s, when I headed the team at the FDA that was review-ing the NDA for recombinant human insulin, … we were ready to recom-mend approval a mere four months after the application was submitted (at a time when the average time for NDA review was more than two and a half years). With quintessential bu-reaucratic reasoning, my supervisor refused to sign off on the approval — even though he agreed that the data provided compelling evidence of the drug’s safety and effectiveness. “If anything goes wrong,” he argued, “think how bad it will look that we approved the drug so quickly.”

As shown earlier, such delays in approving drugs — and, worse, complete denials of approval — can cost countless lives. But since these victims never make the news, the FDA has every incentive to continue its current practices.

Having laid out their compelling case against the FDA, Klein and Tabarrok turn their attention to options for reforming the system.

recommendedreformsThe first suggested reform is for the FDA to provide more information to consum-ers about the drugs that are available. They point out that consumers “can and should ask for product labels with their prescrip-tions” and that the “FDA should also pay more attention to designing labels that can be easily read and understood,” in contrast to longstanding practice whereby it is as-sumed that consumers are too ignorant

to understand accurate drug labels and should therefore defer to the received wisdom of their physicians and the FDA. Furthermore, the econ-omists recommend a “split-label regime” whereby “the product label would consist of a part for FDA-approved health and nutrition claims and a part for ‘Not FDA Approved’ claims.” This ap-proach is already working

well for dietary supplements and could work equally well for drugs.

“As of 2008 the FDA may deny seri-ously ill patients — those facing morbidity or death from their illnesses — the use of unapproved drugs,” write Klein and Tabar-rok. “This FDA intervention has resulted in incidents where physicians were unable to provide experimental or unapproved treatments despite the terminal nature of their patients’ illnesses.” They recommend passage of the “Access, Compassion, Care and Ethics for Seriously Ill Patients Act,” which was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) in 2008 but never got out of committee. While far from perfect, the bill does give seriously

ill patients and their doctors the option to choose riskier treatments and protects drug companies from subsequent lawsuits.

A third recommendation is to adopt Henry Miller’s proposal, to wit: Nongov-ernmental drug-certifying entities would compete in the free market for hire by pharmaceutical companies to oversee drug development and testing. If the hired body certified a new drug, the certifier and the drug company would together present the NDA to the FDA, which would then have 90 days to respond. Failure to respond would constitute automatic approval — a welcome return to a portion of the pre-1962 state of affairs.

Klein and Tabarrok also suggest that the “U.S. government should establish reci-procity with countries that have a proven record of approving safe drugs — includ-ing most west European countries, Cana-da, Japan, and Australia.” This, they say, would “eliminate the FDA’s monopoly on drug approval” because foreign drug companies whose products have already been approved in their own countries could then immediately market them in the United States, and U.S. drug compa-nies would have the option of taking their drugs to foreign governments for certifica-

The extra time required for approval by the U.S. government versus European governments, known as drug lag, has resulted in “hundreds of thousands” of deaths over the years. The “conclusion is clear: the FDA is responsible for more lives lost than lives saved.”

Help? Because of government regulations, cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine need a doctor’s prescription, though they were sold over the counter. People will need to pay to see a doctor to get these drugs because some people use them to make methamphetamine.

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tion, knowing that approval in, say, Great Britain would mean automatic approval in the United States.

They next suggest, as they had explicitly stated earlier, that the proof-of-efficacy re-quirement be completely eliminated since “there is strong evidence that private en-terprise and tort law takes [sic] care of ef-ficacy and that the costs, delays, and drug loss from FDA efficacy requirements are unredeemed.” “That simple reform,” they explain, “would greatly expand the range of drugs developed (in particular for rare diseases), increase the speed with which they get to market, and significantly re-duce costs and drug prices.”

The final reform short of complete freedom that the authors suggest is simply to make FDA drug testing and approval optional. This, they aver, would quickly prove whether healthcare providers and patients actually value the FDA’s seal of approval or merely submit to its approval process because they have no choice. Of course, as they point out in a sidebar, if this reform were enacted, “the FDA would probably sink like a stone, and FDA of-ficials know it,” which explains their op-position to any and all liberalization.

After discussing these potential reforms, Klein and Tabarrok then describe their ideal reform, which they term the “Sen-sible Alternative,” defined as “a voluntary system in which private firms, organiza-tions, and perhaps also other governments and a voluntary FDA assured consumers of drug safety and efficacy.” “Careful re-flection,” they argue, “will show that the combination of voluntary practices and

the tort system are well able to meet the demand for quality and safety assurance.”

They then describe in some detail three parts of their voluntary system that they believe will help assure both quality and safety in pharmaceuticals.

First is the seller’s reputation. A drug company with a track record of selling safe, effective drugs will garner both repeat and new business. A company that sells unsafe or ineffective drugs will face losses, a fact of life that Johnson & Johnson is learning the hard way at present. Having recalled millions of units of Tylenol, Motrin, and Benadryl over the past year, the company is now facing a perhaps permanent loss of business to less expensive and safer store-brand equivalents, according to an August 6 CNN report. Consumers have discovered that they can get by just fine with the store brands, and they may be wary of returning to the brand-name drugs that have proved less than safe. Will they also become less willing to purchase other Johnson & John-son products? Only time will tell.

Second on Klein and Tabarrok’s list is “knower organizations.” A knower organi-zation is a “private organization that knows more than the consumer about a seller’s reputation or about the quality and safety of the seller’s products.” Knower organiza-tions “often inspect quality and safety, and grant a certification mark or seal of approv-al.” Among existing knower organizations are Good Housekeeping, Underwriters’ Laboratories, Moody’s, and the American Dental Association. Knower organizations “may investigate quality and safety, and sell their reports directly to consumers”; ex-

amples include the ECRI Institute (which evaluates medical products for hospitals, HMOs, and govern-ment agencies), Consumer Re-ports, credit bureaus, and doctors and pharmacists. There would, the economists argue, be many more such organizations if not for the existence of the FDA, which most individuals and businesses take for a knower organization when in fact it is a bureaucratic permission granter.

Third, the authors cite middle-men, from pharmacies to pharma-ceutical companies to HMOs, as those who have strong profit in-centives to ensure that drugs sold

to the public are safe and effective.Finally, Klein and Tabarrok suggest

a thought experiment. What if someone proposed that there be a federal agency that had complete authority over what electronic products could be brought to market? Most people would quite cor-rectly find that absurd because the market already has many built-in safeguards to ensure that electronics are safe. Yet this is precisely the regime under which Ameri-cans are forced to live when it comes to drugs and medical devices.

Drs. Klein and Tabarrok have per-formed an outstanding service by collect-ing in one place the many disparate studies on the harm done by the FDA and, further, by suggesting both partial reforms and, ul-timately, their sensible alternative, which is to say, freedom.

In their 1993 book Freedom of Informed Choice: FDA Versus Nutrient Supplements, Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw quoted their correspondence with the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman (one of many such quotations on FDAReview.org), summing up the project’s conclusions quite nicely: “‘The FDA has already done enormous harm to the health of the Ameri-can public by greatly increasing the costs of pharmaceutical research, thereby reducing the supply of new and effective drugs, and by delaying the approval of such drugs as survive the tortuous FDA process.’ When asked, if you could do anything to improve health in America, what would you do? Friedman replied: ‘No more licensing of doctors. No more regulation of drugs. Not of any kind. Period.’” n

ludicrousness: If someone were to propose that government create a new arm to regulate and test electronics, people would likely heap ridicule upon him because private entities like Underwriters’ Laboratories, a private-sector group, already does that job well. A similar group could test drugs.

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by Kelly Holt

A favorite Aesop’s fable is about an eagle. Perched on a lofty rock, he watched the movements of a hare,

which he hoped to have for dinner. An ar-cher, who saw the eagle from a place of concealment, took careful aim and mortal-ly wounded him. The eagle gave one look at the arrow in his heart and saw in that single glance that the arrow was fletched with the eagle’s own feathers. “It is a double grief to me,” he exclaimed, “that I should perish by an arrow feathered from my own wings.” The moral of the story is that we often give our enemies the means to destroy us.

This is true in personal interactions, politics, and world trade and economics — something that many Americans are

beginning to learn. Texans were livid a few years ago when they discovered that a system of toll roads was being built with-out citizen input and that the “Trans Texas Corridor,” which took vast swaths of land via eminent domain and funneled public tolls into private coffers through public-private partnerships, was being built to fa-cilitate trucking from deepwater ports in Mexico throughout the United States and Canada so that American dockworkers and factory workers could be bypassed.

Readers will remember the fierce con-flict in Texas over the massive assemblage of freight and passenger lanes and util-ity, water, and electronic lines that were to have converged into a “transportation corridor” (TTC-35). Rather than solving Texas’ transportation problems (as the project was billed to do), it would have

worked against Texans’ (and the nation’s) freedom and sovereignty. Criticism of the project was leveled against the Texas Department of Transportation’s (TxDOT) bullying, using “eminent domain” to con-fiscate private property, and the almost incomprehensible revelation that rev-enues from the toll-only roads would be returned to a foreign private company, Cintra (Spain), for its share in helping develop the project, amongst numerous other reasons. That alone is fascism. (See the online article “Trans Texas Corridor Renamed, Not Dead”.)

The outrage surrounding the Trans Texas Corridor has died down, but Ameri-cans would be foolish if we mistook qui-etude for victory. The battle for the mid-continent is far from over, and our enemies continue to take aim.

WhereDoestheProjectStandnow?After Texans took their legislators behind the barn for a “knock-down, drag-out” in the 2007 legislative session and TxDOT came under review for its practices, the agency announced earlier this year a “No Action Alternative,” a recommendation to the Federal Highway Administration that “No Action” be taken — end the TTC-35 project. The legislative process had re-quired TxDOT to complete two “tiers,” or phases, in constructing the superhigh-way — the first being the Environmental Impact Study (EIS). The EIS (Tier One) was intended to gauge not only the envi-ronmental, but also the economic, social, and cultural impact of a project. It was during this stage that the state suffered the fury unleashed by angry Texans, and after which TxDOT submitted its “No Action Alternative.”

TTC-35 went off the legislative radar, as there is no money to do the deal and no political will to resurrect it after citi-zens “got their Texan on.” And violence at the border has interrupted everybody’s efforts to do much of anything that doesn’t concern that issue. In a July 17 Fox inter-view with Greta Van Susteren, Texas At-torney General Greg Abbott said that the need for action (and federal assistance) on the border is urgent. Among other things, Abbott stated that “in the border city of Juarez alone (across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas), more than 2,400 people in the last couple of years have lost their

The Trans Texas Corridor, which is meant to begin a road network to help unify America, Canada, and Mexico similar to unity in the EU, though slowed, is continuing.

Pinocchiowouldbejealous: Doug Booher, the environmental manager for the Texas Turnpike Authority Division of the Texas Department of Transportation, announced in 2009 that TxDot is taking formal steps to end the Trans Texas Corridor, yet building continues.

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lives to the drug cartel war.... It is more dangerous to walk the streets of Juarez than to walk the streets of Baghdad.” Po-litical hurdles, border violence, taxpayer lack of money? Heck, with all that going on, it’s much more difficult to get the road through, and legislatively, the state cannot exercise what was the enabling legislation: the Comprehensive Development Agree-ment (CDA).

But that doesn’t mean Texas or the con-tinent is safe. While the funding mecha-nism (CDA) for the project at a state level is gone, the framework for the corridor is still in the transportation code. And the su-perhighway is still being built — in pieces.

The loophole is that cities, counties, and municipalities can, using CDAs, make private equity toll deals all day long.

This is happening in the Dallas/Fort Worth area with the North Texas Tollway Authority. NTTA is a political subdivision of the State of Texas representing five North Texas counties. This re-gional authority made its own deal with Cintra, not relying on the state to get the job done. Its website states that it is “em-powered to acquire, construct, maintain, and operate turnpike

projects to raise capital for construction projects, collect tolls to operate, maintain, and pay debt service on these projects.” It also states that its mission is “to enhance mobility through responsible and innova-tive tolling solutions.”

Innovative tolling solutions? Anytime a private company is involved in the col-lection of public tolls, the interests of the taxpayer are not served. Cintra is active in private toll deals and builds transportation infrastructure worldwide. A Texas capitol insider states that this project, between Cintra and NTTA, is the largest private equity toll deal in the world. CDAs such as the NTTA can solve local problems, but spell danger via their potential to link such urban projects with rural ones. The NTTA is an example of what to expect in Texas’

transportation future. This monstrous re-gional private equity transportation proj-ect will accomplish in North Texas what a statewide corridor project could not. Cor-ridor building will happen this way: Urban stretches will be built first, instead of rural ones. Profits could fund other portions — that is, urban tolls could fund rural proj-ects later.

Construction on other corridors around Texas (LaEntrada al Pacifico, Ports to Plains) continues as well. And then there’s I-69.

The I-69 Corridor is another high-pri-ority corridor in the state, traversing the coastal area of Texas to points east and north, culminating in Michigan. Current focus is on a section between Beeville and Houston, Texas. While the scope of this project isn’t nearly as broad as TTC-35, and the footprint has been altered consid-erably owing to public pressure, construc-tion on this project continues, keeping a lower profile. But it should be remem-bered that the goal behind constructing this highway remains the same — increase the ease and capacity for the transport of people and goods across the three “North American Union” nations.

TxDOT is unapologetic about building the superhighways piecemeal, even after facing the public’s outrage and despite an official negative review of its activities. In Texas, a process called Sunset Review is in place to make sure each agency is periodi-cally reviewed for relevancy, funding, and violations. When it came TxDOT’s turn for review, it was condemned for its slippery practices. It is under review again, largely for serious complaints lodged concerning its handling of the TTC. Has TxDOT re-formed? No. It is still doing private toll deals, just doing them locally.

TxDOT’s website has this to say: “TxDOT is updating the long-range, mul-timodal statewide transportation plan. The new Statewide Long-Range Transporta-tion Plan 2035 will serve as the state’s 24-year ‘blueprint’ for the planning pro-cess. It will guide the collaborative efforts between TxDOT, local and regional deci-sion-makers and all transportation stake-holders to reach a consensus on trans-portation needs.” The concept of private companies doing deals is alive and well.

Also on the website, a document en-titled “More Than Just a Road” promises

TxDOT, the Texas Department of Transportation, is unapologetic about building the superhighways piecemeal, even after facing the public’s outrage and despite an official negative review of its activities.

otherconsiderations:The 1,200-foot-wide Trans Texas Corridor would lead to the taking by government of over a half million acres of privately held land through eminent domain. This farm, owned by the family for over 120 years, would likely be destroyed, along with its buildings.

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to “build only those projects that serve unique regional needs and that can be in-tegrated into a comprehensive statewide transportation project.” Again, it shows no improvement. The original plan would have built the road in segments anyway, segments that would eventually be con-nected. The commitment to integrating the network of roads still stands. What a con.

DirectionoftheProjectAnd though it may seem as if the super-highway battle is solely Texas’ show at this point, it’s not a big jump to conclude that if the roads’ progress has been at least slowed in Texas, then it will be built from Canada to Mexico instead. Corridors built from Canada through the continent’s middle would eventually force Texas and Oklahoma (Oklahoma is the one other state in which citizens are actively fighting the superhighways) to concede unless the electorate understands the magnitude of the problem and how to stop it. Canada con-tinues development of its north-south corri-dors intended to connect with the American segments, called the Canamex, Pacific, and Eastern Seaboard corridors, and, of course, the Mid-Continent Corridor that parallels I-35, the critical Texas segment.

Then there’s the Arctic bridge — Canada is developing an east-west trade route called the Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative, including the Arctic Bridge. What is that? The Arctic Bridge is Canada’s shared vision with Russia to “encompass both air and sea connections between Russia and Canada,” according to the initiative’s website. The mission of the initiative is to establish Canada’s Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor as the “best transportation network facilitating global supply chains between North America and Asia.” Do we really need to provide Russia with improved access to the northern por-tion of our continent?

Finally, remember NASCO, North America’s Supercorridor Coaliton? It is well developed and well funded, and it is providing the network for government, business, and trade entities dedicated to “uniting public and private sectors to ad-dress critical national and international trade, transportation, security and environ-mental issues.” NASCO has been essen-tial in developing cooperation (and who knows what else) among all the stakehold-

ers to construct the Mid-Continent Corri-dor, and a video on its website indicates that it has not scaled back or slowed down its plans. Consider this. In NASCO’s re-port for June 1, 2010, it applauded Presi-dent Obama’s May meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderon in Washington: “Obama also emphasized that the govern-ments of the U.S. and Mexico are working on a new customs cooperation program aimed at making cross-border trade more secure, while streamlining the process of inspection and security and deepening the process of standardization of norms and regulations to cut costs and eliminate waste for North American businesses.” Realistically, this means more outsourc-ing of blue-collar jobs to Mexico on the way to opening up the border altogether (See “Express Route to Poverty,” October 15, 2007).

The report continued with this quote from Calderon, “The emergence of their nations from the economic global crisis is opening ‘a window of opportunity for Canada, the United States and Mexico to reposition Mexico and North America as a vigorous region — competitive and prosperous, capable of generating more and better jobs, and a region that will be attractive for investments, trade exchange and tourism, with a great future.” He said, “Together the NAFTA bloc could increase its joint exporting capacity to meet grow-ing competitiveness from different regions of the world.”

All this to say, don’t look now, but the

regionalists/globalists are still here. The ground that was reclaimed by Texas in de-feating the TTC so far happened because the local electorate got mad and did some-thing. As always, an informed electorate is the answer. And local action got the job done. Each state, municipality, and region in the path of one of the National Highway System’s 80 high priority corridors must be vigilant and informed about the true na-ture of these corridors — which is simply providing infrastructure to merge Canada, Mexico, and the United States into a North American Union (See the October 15, 2007 issue of the new AmericAn). And in the doing, private equity deals are just another way to steal your money and put it in the pocket of your government, or the pocket of a foreign company.

In the end, if the North American Union (NAU) is to be implemented, it is likely that a trade corridor must be constructed. Projects such those run by Texas’ NTTA are the way to get there. And there are no indications that the NAU will simply go away. In fact, our government’s im-migration policies being what they are, it seems our political and business elites are working harder than ever to dissolve the remaining distinctions between Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

Other states will feel the pressure to begin corridor construction if they haven’t already. Learn about the corridors, and the private equity deals that surround them; otherwise, our feathers will show up in the arrow that kills us. n

DivertingTexans’attention:The violence on the border with Mexico has drawn the focus of both Texas’ legislators and its citizens, taking it away from the Trans Texas Corridor.

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by Rebecca Terrell

Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam, by Brian Sussman, Washington, D.C.: World Net Daily, 2010, 224 pages, hardcover.

G ideons International should obtain rights to this title and place a copy in every hotel room in the United States. It is a veritable bible arming readers with information they

need to refute the claims of environmentalists that humans can adversely influence climate. Americans need to understand this issue, because devastating public policy is being crafted based on faulty science cooked up by those who stand to make a lot of money off the hoax.

Readers of the new AmericAn in San Francisco will recog-nize the author, Brian Sussman. He is an award-winning science reporter and meteorologist and hosts a top-rated talk radio pro-gram in the Bay area. He has more than 20 years’ experience in climate science and is dedicated to refuting the claims of those who promote the idea of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming (AGW).

As the title indicates, Sussman’s book tells the story of Climat-egate, the incident of November 2009 in which hackers pirated hundreds of e-mails from a British university. The correspon-dence revealed that top UN climate scientists from around the world had for more than a decade been fraudulently reporting data to favor their alarmist climate agenda.

ScienceHowever, Sussman’s book does not stop there. In fact, he began writing it more than two years ago. As he was wrapping up the final version, Climategate broke, and he redrafted the entire work, incorporating important highlights of the scandal along with background information about the perpetrators. Evidence from these e-mails significantly reinforces many of the points Sussman makes in his exposé of fabricated climate science.

For example, he gives a brief explanation of the cyclical nature of climate, citing the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) when global temperatures were considerably higher than those of the pres-ent day, and the subsequent Little Ice Age (LIA), during which once-fertile Greenland became buried under ice. He shows how proof of global climate fluctuations is based on physical evidence and historical observations. More importantly, he reveals — from both personal experience and Climategate e-mails — a concerted media coverup of the truth.

There are many other climate myths that Sussman debunks in his page-turning book. For example, it is a common media-inspired misconception that the United States is withering under its hottest weather in history. Sussman reports on the shockingly large number of official U.S. weather monitoring stations com-promised by increasing urbanization in their immediate vicini-ties. The results of these and other setting violations are false recordings significantly higher than actual surface temperatures. Additionally, he shows that corrected official temperature records rank the 1930s as the hottest decade in the last century and reveal a net cooling since that time despite increased consumption of fossil fuels during the same period.

Next, Sussman zeros in on the main object of climate-change

More than just a book about Climategate, the leaking of e-mails from global-warming alarmists, Climategate covers the science, politics, and goals behind global-warming claims.

A GlobAl-WArminG Primer

www.TheNewAmerican.com 31www.TheNewAmerican.com

book rEviEw

propaganda: carbon dioxide. Hardly a pollutant, CO2 is a vital component of the Earth’s atmosphere yet makes up only 0.038 percent of it. Of that scant amount, human activity accounts for 3 percent of the atmospheric CO2 — or little more than one thousandth of a percent of the atmosphere! Even if doubled, the amount would be infinitesimal.

economicS And Public PolicySussman’s book encompasses more than science, because his purpose in writing is not merely to refute errors. The climate de-bate would not exist if unscrupulous politi-cians did not intend to use the concocted data to enact public policies set to cripple developed nations’ economies and force consumers back to archaic levels of ener-gy consumption. “Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat’s dream. If you control carbon, you control life,” said Dr. Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2007.

His words have already played out in real life. In December, Ed Hiserodt re-ported for the new AmericAn, “Last January the government of Chad outlawed charcoal because of its emissions of CO2. This caused a riot in the streets by women whose only method of cooking for their families was being taken from them to pacify the environmental extremists. Their plea was, ‘Kill us now. That is better than starving to death.’”

Sussman warns his readers that eco-fa-natics have the same thing in mind for the United States. New technologies with chill-ingly Orwellian potential are already in use that will allow government authorities to monitor home appliances and control them remotely. For example, updated building codes now mandate the use of Program-mable Communicating Ther-mostats (PCT), which “allow the utility to change settings on the thermostat based on

load or other factors.” Mean-while, companies such as GE, Google, Microsoft, and IBM stand to make fortunes on the development of such technology. Hardly surpris-ing is Al Gore’s stake in many of these eco-mercenaries. Equally damning is Barack Obama’s interest in the Chica-

go Climate Exchange, a commodity market poised “to become the designated carbon trading depot” if the President’s dreams of carbon-taxing cap-and-trade become reality.

AlmoSt PerfectThere are only two issues Sussman raised that deserve a more complete explanation.*

They involve his discussion of alternatives to fossil fuel energy sources. Chapter Nine is devoted to analyzing the pros and cons of several, including wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear. In addressing wind power, Sussman states, “I’m not denying the va-lidity of wind power — those turbines re-ally do spin out energy.” He goes on to ex-plain how unreliable and dangerous wind turbines are, which is true. But the energy they “spin out” is totally unsuitable for powering an industrial economy and must always be backed up with some reliable form of generation that always must be kept running because wind is intermittent and can stop at any time.

Additionally, Sussman devotes only two pages to nuclear power. Though he defends it against undeserved alarmism continuing ad nauseam since the 1979 Three Mile Island incident, he omits the vital point that nuclear is the safest, clean-est, and by far most efficient and readily available answer to the so-called “energy crisis.” There is nothing wrong with fossil fuels, but nuclear is unquestionably su-perior and should be the main source of power generation in the United States and around the world. Considering spent fuel reprocessing potential, current reserves are sufficient for millennia, which gives a completely new twist to the term “renew-ables.” The “energy crisis” is perpetrated by government policies that shackle nucle-ar while funneling taxpayer money to inef-ficient and wasteful wind, solar, and other misnamed renewable energy sources.

Despite these points, Climategate de-serves high praise and is a must-read for every patriotic American interested in sav-ing his country from assassins masquer-ading as eco-do-gooders. Sussman closes his book with a prayer all should willingly echo: “May God give us the grace to do what is right.” Amen. n

“Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat’s dream. If you control carbon, you control life,” said Dr. Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2007.

* There is actually a third issue Sussman discussed,

which is beside the point of this article but none-

theless needs correcting. In Chapter Seven he com-

pares the persecution of AGW deniers to the Catho-

lic Church’s treatment of scientists throughout the

centuries. This is a very poor analogy. For example,

Sussman says that the Catholic Church persecuted

those who defied the theory of geocentrism — the

belief that the Earth is the center of the universe —

prior to the revelations of Nicolas Copernicus, who

had to work in secret for fear of church authori-

ties. On the contrary, Copernicus, a Polish canon of

Frauenburg Cathedral, based his heliocentric find-

ings on a theory originally proposed by Aristarchus

of Samos, a Greek scientist of the third century B.C.

It was the Catholic Church’s reverence for science

that kept the findings of Aristarchus alive and made

them available more than 1,700 years later to Co-

pernicus, whose research provided the basis for the

Gregorian calendar. Moreover, as a devoted church-

man, he neither could nor would have conducted his

research without permission from his superiors. To

claim otherwise is to do his memory great injustice.

Sussman’s other examples,

including ones on Giordano

Bruno and Galileo, are equally

flawed.


book rEviEw

caboodleranchOn August 26, 2010, Canada Free Press ran the wonderful story of Caboodle Ranch near Jacksonville, Florida. The ranch used to be a tree farm, but is now home to over 600 formerly homeless felines.

Caboodle’s owner, Craig Grant, fell in love with cats several years ago and de-veloped a strong desire to rescue stray kit-ties. He had been living in a condominium, but as his feline family expanded he found he needed more room, so purchased the 30-acre tree farm and relocated his fam-ily. With the added space, of course, he had the ability to save even more cats, and his family continued to grow. Florida’s WCTV.tv, which first “broke” the story in January 2009, reported in a follow-up on September 1 of this year that 660 cats now populate the sanctuary.

Grant has made a charming “city” for his friends, complete with houses, city hall, a church, a motel, etc. — even a Walmart — all cat-sized, of course. The cats are all spayed or neutered, vaccinat-ed, and treated for pests. They have room to roam free, yet are still kept safe and healthy. Hundreds of cats that would have been euthanized or, even worse, roaming the streets as harmful strays, reproducing and spreading diseases, now call Caboodle home.

Many people think spending time and money on animals is wasted, that the re-sources could be better spent on human needs, and perhaps this is true. However, the good side to a story like this is that this man cares about life and is willing to make the sacrifice himself to provide these fe-lines a decent life. He does not demand that others take care of them, does not demand that the government spend taxpayers’ dol-lars, and did not demand that the govern-ment confiscate land to be utilized for his sanctuary. Caboodle Ranch is strictly pri-vately funded. Craig does the majority of the work himself, though gladly accepting help from volunteers. Veterinary services are provided free or at a reduced cost — voluntarily by the providers.

He is not “raising” cats and increasing the population. He merely cares for the ones that are already here for as long as they live. He immediately spays or neu-

ters them all, to avoid further increasing the number needing care.

Yes, economic times are hard, and many people are in need. However, frequently one of their needs is a new home for their pets, which they can no longer afford to keep. Caboodle Ranch provides some of those folks an alternative to euthanizing or simply abandoning their beloved pets, and that’s good for the cats and the people.

landlordlargessThough it seems landlords in general may have a bad rap, the truth is they are often the victims rather than the perpetrators of injustice. They are also people just like the rest of us, and have the same capacity for kindness. An article in Texas’ Kingwood Observer News on August 31 demon-strates this.

Dave Klaybor purchased his home six years ago in Forest Cove, Texas, and kept it in very good condition. However, shortly after moving in he was transferred to Cali-fornia and ended up having to move. After successfully renting out his Texas home for several years, he began to “have a bad feeling” about the property. This feeling was well substantiated when he learned that, indeed, the property had been aban-doned and trashed.

Being several states away and unable to tend to the home himself, Klaybor at first was in a quandary. Searching through online advertisements and websites for ideas, though, he came upon Kingwood, Texas, resident Ray Birden. Birden is himself a landlord and certainly under-stands the difficulties of having proper-ties destroyed by renters.

Klaybor wrote to Birden, simply asking for advice as to whom he could ask for assistance in checking out and repairing his rental home. Birden went above and beyond that, though. He first went and inspected the property himself, and took pictures which he e-mailed to Klaybor. He then took it upon himself to repair the damaged home, and even put it back on the market. He kept in close contact with Klaybor, e-mailing him pictures of the progress. Though Birden didn’t complete-ly work for free, “He charged me a little

for his time in the beginning, and then nothing near the end as more and more expenses incurred, so he didn’t charge me a lot considering the situation,” Klaybor told the Observer. “I could not believe he stepped in to help a total stranger. It was like an angel was sent to help me when I was in dire need.”

The home is now completely renovated, rented, and an asset to the neighborhood, thanks to Birden’s generosity. Downplaying his kindness, Birden told the paper, “It was one of those times you take a risk to help someone in need and in this case, it worked out for everyone involved. I just felt com-passionate toward him and had to help.”

mommyTeamworkWhen fire broke out in Katrina Eash’s house in Belfair, Washington, on Au-gust 22, she was able to get three of her four children safely out. However, heavy flames and smoke separated her from her 11-month-old daughter, who was sleeping in her crib. Running around to the infant’s bedroom window, she tried to get in that way, but the window was six feet off the ground and simply too high for her to climb through.

Eash was screaming for help when Robin Adair happened to drive by. Hear-ing Eash’s cries and seeing the flames, Adair rushed to help. Without much plan-ning, but lots of “mama bear instinct,” the two women teamed up for a dramatic res-cue. Eash boosted Adair up so she could get in through the window. Adair felt her way through the thick smoke to the crib, picked up the baby, and passed her out the window to Eash. Adair herself narrowly escaped the flames.

Although the county’s fire district says it will present Adair with its Valor Award, it is clear that an award was not her mo-tivation for helping. “I have a baby of my own.... As soon as I heard there was a baby in there, nothing was stopping me,” she told KING 5 News on August 23. And though Eash’s home may be gone, she is overwhelmingly grateful that her family is safe. “I’m just thankful that I’ve got my girls; that’s all that matters.” n

— liAnA StAnley


THE GOODNESS OF AMERICA

by Jack Kenny

Ted Williams had just returned from a hunting trip in Minnesota, about 40 miles north of Minneapolis,

when he heard the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Most Ameri-can League pitchers, the Japanese, and later the North Koreans and Communist Chinese, no doubt wished he had stayed there. Absorbed in his trinity of pursuits — hitting, hunting, and fishing — Wil-liams had paid little attention until then to the war that began in Europe in 1939. But Pearl Harbor got the attention of Ted Williams and millions of other heavy hit-ters in America. The Germans, their hands full with Russia, Great Britain, and other implacable foes, knew better than to wake a sleeping giant in North America. Japan did not.

Williams has often been compared to John Wayne’s on-screen persona, and the comparison is apt. Essentially a loner, Wil-liams loved the cowboy movies, especially those starring Hoot Gibson, and all his life he played the loner who only needed the open trail and a reliable means of transpor-tation (I don’t know if he ever rode horses) to fulfill his life’s mission. The drifter in the cowboy films, who formed no close permanent ties other than to his horse, must have inspired Williams, who had the same affection for his bat. Have bat will travel, to New York, Philadelphia or Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, or Washington, D.C. It is ironic that the determined young man from San Diego finished his 22-year major league career with the Boston Red Sox just before base-ball’s westward expansion brought big league ball to the Gold Coast.

His fast wrists for hire heeded the call-ing wind. He was more than a little like the post-Civil War hero Johnny Yuma of

television’s The Rebel. Yes, “Teddy Ball-game” was a rebel. He was, to paraphrase Johnny Cash, “panther quick” with the bat and “leather tough” with his tongue. And no one had to push him very far or for very long before “he figured that he’d been pushed enough.” Few characters in American life or fiction have been more naturally combative than Theodore Samu-el Williams, a Hall of Fame baseball star, war hero, and humanitarian.

Putting It All out There“I hit better when I’m mad,” said Wil-liams, who may have spent more money on newspapers than on meals, looking for

sports columns that gave him reason to be mad. North Korean and Chinese pilots also gave him reason. “I fly better when I’m mad,” he said. The anger brought his tremendous skills and relentless determi-nation the edge that made him even more dangerous. Fortunately, I never saw Ted Williams mad. But you needed not to ob-serve him for very long or in any particu-lar setting to see him annoyed, irritated, vexed, and above all, argumentative.

I saw him for the first time in Nashua, New Hampshire, in 1984, long after he had retired from Major League Baseball. He had come up north in the dead of winter to help his friend and part owner of the Red

batterup! For his last spring training in 1942, before the big war beckoned, Williams grabbed some lumber and brandished his own “weapons of mass destruction” at major league pitchers.

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— Past and PErsPEctivEHistoryHistoryTed Williams, arguably the greatest hitter who ever lived, brought his keen eyesight, quick reflexes, and combative personality to two wars in service of the United States.

Baseball Hero

Sox Sam Tamposi hawk some real estate in Florida. Williams had a home in Cit-rus Hills, one of the many developments of Tamposi, a real estate mogul living in southern New Hampshire. He had come up to pitch similar properties, with all their charming amenities, to the good folks of New Hampshire

When it was over, I prevailed on him to sit with me at a table for an interview for a now-defunct Manchester weekly. He agreed immediately and was surpris-ingly cordial, as he settled his long and still lanky, six-foot-three inch frame into a chair and said, “Shoot.”

There are many questions a reporter would like to ask Ted Williams, which was why he had heard them all hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. I began with the incident I had read about and found most intriguing. Williams, the story goes, announced in his rookie season, possi-bly while still in spring training, that his goal was simply to be the best there ever was and ever would be — at least in his lifetime.

“All I want out of life,” he famously said, “is that when I walk down the street, folks will say, ‘There goes the greatest hit-ter who ever lived.’” Just how lofty a goal that was can best be appreciated by recall-ing that Williams came along not long after the likes of Cobb, Ruth, and Hornsby had finished their fabulous record-setting careers and Lou Gehrig was very nearly at the end of his. And Williams, nearly as astute a student of the history of the game as he was of the science of hitting, knew well what they had done. He was also well aware of what his new teammate Jimmy Foxx was doing in his assault on the rec-ord books.

“Wait’ll you see Foxx hit,” teammate Bobby Doerr was said to have advised Williams when the rookie arrived in Sara-sota for his first spring training.

“Wait’ll Foxx sees me hit,” Williams supposedly said in reply. I would read years later that Williams denied ever hav-ing said that, but acknowledged it would not be out of character for him if he had. So I had to know if the “greatest hitter who ever lived” quote was authentic.

“Yeah, I said that,” he answered with just a touch of defensiveness in his voice — as if to say, “Why not?” or even “So what?” Indeed, many, if not most, knowl-

edgeable baseball men had been saying for decades that Williams was the greatest hitter who ever lived. Now I wanted to learn the great slugger’s own assessment of his place in baseball history.

“Well,” I said, “do you think you accomplished that?”

“Well, I’d say I come pretty close,” he said with a charming display of modesty. “I’d say I’m in the top 20.” Then, before I could scrib-ble “top 20” in my notebook, he amended his rating.

“Make that top ten,” he corrected him-self. Surely baseball’s greatest hitter — ar-guably at least — should have the same privilege as a mere Congressman to “re-vise and extend” his remarks.

“Maybe the top three,” I suggested, opening a can of worms. Williams re-sponded only with an expressionless stare, as though waiting to hear more.

“Who are the other two?” someone

at the table asked. I said I guessed they would be Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. That got Mr. Williams going.

“Oh, yeah? What about Eddie Collins? What about Al Simmons?” Williams men-tioned two or three other “what abouts” before settling on an old teammate.

“What about Jimmy Foxx? You think he could hit?”

“Yeah, he could hit,” I agreed.“Ho-ho, I guess so!” Williams ex-

claimed.The record on that speaks for itself.

Foxx had a .325 career batting average

At age 39, he made another run at .400 and might have made it with a little more speed to beat out “leg hits.” As it was, he finished the season with a league-leading .388, leaving runner-up and reigning MVP Mickey Mantle in the dust at .365.

all-aroundsportsman: Though he loved the warm weather in baseball season, Williams was an outdoorsman in winter as well. As a hunter, he found the woods in Maine or Minnesota “lovely, dark and deep.”

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(the exact equal of Joe DiMaggio’s) to go with his 534 home runs — 13 more than the impressive 521 Williams racked up, though Williams’ career was interrupted by nearly five years of wartime service. Yes, Foxx could flat out hit.

But now I have wandered into the field of statistics while writing about one of the most fascinating personalities the game of baseball, or indeed, the history of America has ever known. It was said of Douglas MacArthur that if he had gone on stage instead of into the Army, we never would have heard of John Bar-rymore. If Ted Williams had chosen to make the military his fulltime career, he might have eclipsed MacArthur or Patton or heroes of the air like Eddie Ricken-backer. Because whatever he turned his hand to, Williams worked at tirelessly because he wanted to be the best — and usually was.

“There’s nobody in heaven or earth knows more about fishing than I do,” he once boasted.

“Sure there is, Ted,” someone dared to contradict him.

“Who?” Williams demanded in that thunderous voice that one writer claimed flushed Florida’s flamingos from their nests.

“Well,” his companion observed, “God made the fish.” Williams pondered that for a moment.

“Well, all right,” he grudgingly ac-knowledged. “But you had to go back a hell of a long way.”

And go back we must, quite a long way, into the rec ord books to get an ap-preciation of the man’s accomplishments in baseball. Even those who seldom dwell on the numbers may find the Williams record breathtaking. It was as though he were born hitting .344, the average he achieved in just his second big league season and his career batting average. In his third season, he batted .406, becom-ing, thus far, the last player to bat over .400 for an entire season. The follow-

ing year, his batting aver-age dropped 50 points to a mere .356 and he still won baseball’s mythical Triple Crown, leading the league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in. He would win another Triple Crown in

1947, the only player other than Rogers Hornsby to achieve that twice. At age 39, he made another run at .400 and might have made it with a little more speed to beat out “leg hits.” As it was, he finished the season with a league-leading .388, leaving runner-up and reigning MVP Mickey Mantle in the dust at .365. Not even Ty Cobb hit for such a high average at such an advanced age.

“I may not be the best hitter who ever lived,” Williams announced with a pecu-

liar mix of modesty and triumphalism. “But I’m the best old hitter.”

He won his sixth and final batting title the following year at age 40, barely beat-ing out a young upstart, teammate Pete Runnels, by hitting a more earthbound .328. The following year, through a com-bination of age and injuries, he slumped to an incredible .254, barely respectable by big league standards and pathetic in the life and career of “Teddy Ballgame.” Many, if not most, baseball people thought he was finally done, a mere shad-ow at age 41 of the game’s most danger-ous hitter. But Williams would not leave the game as a vanquished “has been.” He would come back for a final season. And what a season it would be.

It was 1960, and Williams would be ending his big league career 21 and a

“I may not be the best hitter who ever lived,” Williams announced with a peculiar mix of modesty and triumphalism. “But I’m the best old hitter.”

anotherreasontoboast:“Nobody in heaven or earth knows more about fishing than I do,” boasted Williams, who grudgingly acknowledged that maybe God, who created the fish, did.

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— Past and PErsPEctivEHistoryHistory

half years after it began. He started in the spring of 1939, roughly six months before Hitler marched into Poland and ignited World War II. He was 23 when he hit .406, and he would finally bow out, dramati-cally, an aged warrior of 42, in the age of Sputnik, space travel, and intercontinental ballistic missiles that traveled even faster and farther than line drives by Ted Wil-liams. His career numbers, remarkable in their own right, would be more impressive still if his relentless assault on American League pitching had not been interrupted by his military training and service in two wars. He did what he did despite spending nearly five of his best years away from the diamond. Even in the war year of 1942, his last before leaving for Marine avia-tion duty, Williams won the Triple Crown while undergoing his preliminary training for military duty.

His BattlesTo his immense physical and mental skills, 20-10 eyesight, and relentless hard work, add his tremendous ability to ignore dis-tractions and focus on the job at hand. That was no small feat for a man capable of hear-ing a fan in the last row heckling him while 30,000 others were cheering. But Williams, who endured a good deal of ridicule over the draft deferment he obtained as the sole support of his mother, asked to have his status changed to 1-A in May of 1942, and he signed on with the Navy soon after and volunteered for combat aviation. At the end of the ’42 season, he was off to war with the rest of baseball’s able-bodied stars.

The game went on, but such was the paucity of genuinely big-league tal-ent that by 1945, a one-armed outfielder named Pete Gray played for the St. Louis Browns. The stars returned in 1946 and the Red Sox lost to the Cardinals in the World Series, the only one in which Wil-liams played. He batted a feeble .200 for the seven-game series and gave the boo birds another reason to taunt him. He failed when it counted most, they claimed. Williams would fold in the big games. He couldn’t come through in the clutch.

Never mind that, absent Williams, the Red Sox never would have made it to the World Series. The stigma stuck, especially after Williams flopped in the 1948 playoff game after the Sox and Cleveland Indians finished in a dead heat atop the American

League when the 154-game season was over. And he did not come through in the final two games of the season in 1949, when the Red Sox needed only to win one of two at Yankee Stadium to clinch the American League championship. Charac-teristically, they lost both.

His heroics in the glorified exhibitions known as All-Star games added fuel to the claim that Williams didn’t come through when it mattered. He broke an arm making a spectacular catch against the left field wall in the first inning of the All-Star game in Chicago in 1950, and did not come out of the game until the eighth inning. Amazingly, he singled home a run to give the American League the lead in the fifth.

In 1952, he was off to war again, this time in Korea. He was not happy about being called up again, but apparently a man of his keen eyesight, lightning fast reflexes, and aviation experience was needed in the skies over Korea more than

on a baseball field. As a pop singer would say years later after Elvis Presley had been drafted, “Uncle Sam needs you, boy.”

America nearly lost Ted Williams in Korea. His plane was hit and he probably should have parachuted to safety, but chose instead to stay with his damaged plane. He crash-landed, jumped out, and ran from it just before it blew up. After that, it must have been a little easier to do what Wil-liams had always done, stand unflinching when Bob Feller threw a 100-mile-an-hour fastball high and inside.

Williams himself blew up at fans and, especially, sportswriters more times than can be chronicled here. His barracks lan-guage and single-fingered salutes to his critics in the press box earned him the title the “Exquisite Vulgarian,” a name only slightly less endearing than “the Splendid Splinter,” which was meant to be com-plimentary. His elaborate display of con-tempt for the Fenway fickle, methodically spitting toward each set of stands, in the

Lucky and good: America and the world nearly lost Captain Ted Williams, USMC, when the last man to hit .400 crash landed his plane then ran to safety just before it burst into flames.

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summer of 1956 brought him a $5,000 fine by the American League and a suggestion from New York writer Red Smith that Ted could save a lot of money if he would re-frain from spitting in Puritan New England and save his saliva for the subways of Go-tham, where the fine was only two dollars. The next night Williams won the game with a home run in the ninth inning and circled the bases with both hands clasped firmly over his mouth to avoid the temp-tation of spitting again at the now wildly cheering crowd.

He decided early in his career he would never again tip his cap to acknowledge the cheers, a vow he kept through the rest of his brilliant but turbulent career. He did not tip his cap in that final and redemptive 1960 season, when he batted a very respectable .316 and whacked 29 home runs off a variety of pitchers, in-cluding one whose father had served him a homerun ball a generation earlier. He did not tip his cap after hitting a dramatic home run in the bottom of the eighth in-ning in his final at bat in his final game at Boston’s Fenway Park. He refrained again when, after he had trotted out to his position in left field, manager Billy Jurges sent out a replacement for him so he could come trotting in to still more cheers from the fans, who must have felt like they were watching Moses retire from the heights overlooking, but not reaching, the promised land of a World Series championship.

Away from the field, he was cordial to fans, including those who somehow took pleasure in telling him how much they en-joyed screaming insults at him from the left-field stands. For the most part, he shunned the press, but could not keep them from reporting on the tremendous good he did, away from the spotlight, in support of the

Jimmy Fund to combat can-cer in children and in visiting sick and crippled kids in hos-pitals around the country. One could spend days researching and recounting the man’s gen-erosity to his friends and his selfless dedication to chari-table causes, but it would be hard to improve on this tribute on the Jimmy Fund website:

He would go anywhere, and do anything, in the name of The Jimmy Fund — as long as there were no cameras to record his selfless deeds. Over the years Ted has person-ally raised millions of dollars for this charity. Today there is a permanent Williams exhibit at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and members of the “406 Club’’ (named in honor of Ted’s .400 season) have raised more than $2 million for cancer research in Wil-liams’s name.

Thirty-one years after his final game, in a ceremony at Fenway Park commemo-rating the 50 years since he had batted over .400, Williams, now age 73, pulled

a Red Sox cap out of his back pocket, put it on his head and then in one grand gesture, tipped it to the baseball fans in Boston, New England, and the world. He might also have tipped it to the brave men with whom he had served in World War II and those whom he fought both with and against in Korea.

The gallant warrior who had fought so many battles and stirred so many pas-sions left the large baseball spotlight with a sincere and moving gesture of peace and good will. He continued to offer his ac-cumulated wisdom and unequivocal judg-ments to the world until his death in July of 2002, less than two months shy of his 84th birthday. He and we were lucky he lived so long. We are lucky as well that he returned safely to the game he loved after having fought so brilliantly and with such dedication for the country he loved. John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, a U.S. Senator from Ohio, and a Marine pilot who served with Williams in Korea, had only the highest praise for his distinguished Marine Corps teammate.

“He did a helluva good job. Ted only batted .406 for the Red Sox. He batted a thousand for the Marine Corps and the United States.” n

John Glenn, a Marine pilot who served with Williams in Korea, had only the highest praise for his distinguished Marine Corps teammate. “He did a helluva good job. Ted only batted .406 for the Red Sox. He batted a thousand for the Marine Corps and the United States.”

Williams did not acknowledge the cheers of the crowd, even when he homered in his final at bat in Boston’s beloved Fenway Park on September 28, 1960.

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GunmagazinereadershipDailyFinance.com reports that magazines for gun enthusiasts are seeing increases in the number of people reading them. “Among the fastest-growing publications in the first half of 2010 were a slew of ti-tles for gun lovers, hunters, conservatives and NASCAR fans, according to figures just released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.” The circulations for gun-related magazines saw increases in recent times even though, overall, “the industry-wide trend was down for both subscrip-tions and single-copy (i.e., newsstand) sales.” The number of subscriptions to America’s 1st Freedom, a publication of the National Rifle Association, were up 22.6 percent, while American Rifleman, American Hunter, and North American Hunter made the list of the 25 fastest-growing titles.

randPaulandGunrightsKentucky’s senatorial candidate Dr. Rand Paul is rallying to gain the support of gun rights advocates, who political analysts agree are a devoted and reliable voting bloc. The Associated Press reported on June 12 that Paul, who prominently dis-plays images of himself on his campaign website firing weapons, signed autographs and conversed with the crowd at a Louis-ville gun show. The doctor told the audi-ence, “I’m a proud defender of the Second Amendment.... We must be ever vigilant of our Second Amendment Rights.”

ProtectyourGun?Creditors seeking repayment of debt won’t be able to go after guns if Ohio Congressman John Boccieri (D) gets his way. CBS news.com reports that Repre-sentative Boccieri is backing legislation known as “The Protecting Gun Owners in Bankruptcy Act of 2010,” which exempts firearms from the claims of creditors. “Specifically, the measure would permit firearms held primarily for the personal, family or household use of the debtor to be exempt from the claims of creditors under federal exemption law,” Boccieri wrote to colleagues. The National Rifle Associa-

tion (NRA) is backing the legislation, ac-cording to spokeswoman Rachel Parsons.

Federal bankruptcy law, which has morphed into a jumble of unconstitutional legislation, already has exemptions for all kinds of household items, ranging from pets to jewelry, which prevent creditors from seizing protected assets. States also have similar exemptions, and 10 states ac-tually already have a gun exemption for people who file for bankruptcy protection.

alate-nightShopper’snightmareThe Pocono Record reported about an attempted robbery that occurred in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, shortly after midnight on August 28 in a Walmart park-ing lot. In what is a common nightmare scenario for anyone who has ever bought groceries late at night, 28-year-old Joshua Eastman was loading groceries into his car when he was approached by an armed gunman who demanded his money. The al-leged armed robber, Reneau Jean Jacques, who is only 17 years old, reportedly be-came more threatening when Eastman ex-plained that he paid for the groceries with his debit card and did not have cash.

Eastman took out his wallet to appease the menacing robber but then quickly wedged his car door between himself and the robber. His wallet fell to the ground, and Eastman ducked down to get out of the way of Jacques’ gun, which was pointed at him. Jacques allegedly began firing through the car’s door window, which sent shards of glass flying at East-man, cutting into his face. In retaliation, Eastman, who evidently was prepared to defend himself, pulled out a handgun he was carrying and returned fire at the teen hoodlum. Bullets tore into Jacques’ lower leg and foot, sending him limping off in agony toward a nearby restaurant. Eastman retreated into the Walmart, and police soon arrived on the scene to find the injured Jacques burying his weapon in the mulch of the nearby landscaping. After first trying to convince the authori-ties that he was a robbery victim, Jacques was taken into custody on charges of at-

tempted murder, robbery, aggravated as-sault, and reckless endangerment. Ser-geant James Wielgus briefly explained what happened to the local media. “It appears to be an armed robbery that went badly for the suspect because he picked an armed customer.”

EnvironmentalregulatorsGoafterbulletsIf they can’t get you head-on, they’ll try to come around the back. At least that’s what some observers are saying regard-ing the latest idea of federal bureaucrats and their enablers to bypass the Second Amendment. U.S. News & World Report published an article on August 27 about environmental groups petitioning the En-vironmental Protection Agency (EPA) to “ban the use of lead in bullets and shot-gun shells.” The EPA, which planned to solicit public responses to the petition for two months, decided to abandon the effort. In a release to the media, EPA Assistant Administrator for the Office of Chemi-cal Safety and Pollution Prevention Steve Owens explained that the “EPA reached this decision because the agency does not have the legal authority to regulate this type of product.”

Political pundits think there’s more be-hind this story, though, considering the tough November election the Democrats are facing this year. The “gun issue” is already perceived as a reelection-endan-gering liability for liberal candidates. Add that to the fact that guns and ammo are flying off the shelf owing to fears that Obama may try to enact draconian civil-ian disarmament measures, and this is something the feds would rather not get into. The EPA abandonment of the pro-posed lead ban was also prompted by the quick response of gun rights groups such as the National Rifle Association (NRA). NRA Executive Director Chris Cox warned supporters that this was just an-other thinly veiled attempt at gun control that would have the effect of ratcheting up prices so high that only a few could afford the highly priced alternative ammo. n

— pAtricK Krey


“... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” EXERCISING THE RIGHT

SocialSecurityintheredItem: In the early years of the Depres-sion, write Robert Dreier and Donald Cohen in an article entitled “Ignore the fear-mongering on Social Security,” in the Los Angeles Times for August 14, “most business leaders and conservatives considered the very idea that government had a moral responsibility to help senior citizens retire with dignity to be outra-geously radical, a dangerous trampling of individual liberty. They predicted that the Social Security tax would bankrupt the country.”

FDR, according to these cheerleaders, “outmaneuvered Social Security’s op-ponents, using his bully pulpit to explain why they were misguided.... Most Ameri-cans agreed.”Item: Columnist Michael Hiltzik insisted in the Los Angeles Times for August 8, in “The myth of the Social Security system’s financial shortfall,” that the Social Secu-rity trust fund is “real money.” The fund, he railed, “for some two decades has been the prime target of the crowd try-ing to bamboozle Americans into think-ing Social Security is insolvent, bankrupt, broke — pick any term you wish, because they’re all wrong.”Item: President Obama, in his weekly address on August 14, vowed to protect Social Security from unnamed GOP “leaders” determined to carry out the “privatizing” of the system and “tying your benefits to the whims of Wall Street traders and the ups and downs of the stock market.”CorreCtIon: The current President is being duplicitous about Social Security. Indeed, even the distinctly non-conserva-tive FactCheck.org concluded that Presi-dent Obama’s claims excerpted above were “mostly false.”

The Republican leadership is being criticized for something it is not doing by prominent Democrats who have been try-ing to change the subject from what they themselves really are doing — crippling the economy with an unrelenting cam-paign of taxation and spending. In fact, one could rightly criticize GOP leaders for not pushing to “privatize.” They have

steered far away from that route, not even approaching President Bush’s modest at-tempt in 2005, which was misrepresented and asphyxiated.

As FactCheck pointed out, even if Bush’s plan of five years ago were to be fully implemented, less than one-third of any person’s Social Security taxes could have been placed into private accounts. There was so little support for the plan, even within the GOP, “that it died without ever being introduced as a formal piece of legislation.” Currently, the closest thing to what President Bush advocated is being offered by Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee. At the time of Obama’s remarks, the Congressman’s legislation had but 13 cosponsors, none from the Republican House leadership. President Obama, pointed out FactCheck, “further distorted the Republican position when he claimed that the GOP plan would ‘[tie] your benefits to the whims of Wall Street traders.’ That’s not true of the private ac-counts Bush proposed. Those would have been invested in strictly regulated, broadly based mutual funds, much like the funds in which millions of federal workers invest their own retirement funds.”

More importantly, those funds would have been employed voluntarily by those seeking to invest (some) of their own

money, as opposed to mandatory Social Security “contributions” that call for im-prisonment if a normal citizen tries to get out of paying.

If Social Security is such a marvelous notion, why did it need to be a manda-tory monopoly? Jim Powell, the author of FDR’s Folly (2003), has noted that there “never was a popular demand for Social Security, even during the Great Depres-sion. Few Americans were interested in the kind of government-run program that the German politician Otto von Bismarck had introduced in Europe. According to Social Security expert Carolyn Weaver [author of The Crisis in Social Security (1982)], in 1929 about 95 percent of senior citizens were self-supporting — an increasing number had private pension plans or an-nuities. Many seniors were helped out by family and friends.”

In a summary piece for the Future of Freedom Foundation in April of 2009, Powell continued:

Despite the shock of the Great Depres-sion, private pension plans continued to perform well. “Industrial pension plans not only grew steadily,” Weaver reports, “but also proved quite resil-ient, with certain features improving markedly.... The rate of failure for ex-isting plans, moreover, was relatively

SocialSecurityadministrationcommissionermichaelastrue said of the Medicare Board of Trustees report that Social Security will pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes this year and will likely not give cost-of-living increases to recipients next year, for the second year in a row.

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modest. Of the systems operating in 1929, those that were discontinued, closed to new employees, or suspend-ed by 1932 [a low point in the Depres-sion] involved less than 3 percent of all covered employees.” People lost pension coverage primarily because they lost their jobs — a consequence of misguided government policies that brought on the Great Depression and prolonged it.

By 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt embraced the German idea that there should be government-run “social insurance.” That wasn’t legiti-mate insurance, where participants have a contract, they pay premiums based on their life expectancy, the premiums are used to make produc-tive investments that will cover the benefits, and the participants and their heirs have a property right to receive benefits that have been paid for....

There was considerable opposition to the proposed Social Security Act from both Democrats and Republi-cans. Sen. Bennett Clark of Montana proposed an amendment that would have enabled employers to opt out of Social Security if they had pen-sion plans offering more generous benefits than Social Security. That would have meant freedom of choice

for employers and employees alike, but advocates of Social Security were adamantly against freedom of choice.

Most present-day apologists for Social Se-curity don’t go as far as Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times, cited above, who seems to think we will all be rescued by a munifi-cent and bottomless “trust fund.” Still, the affection of many big-government believ-ers can be embarrassingly gushing. One CNBC television commentator last year acknowledged Social Security to be “the largest Ponzi scheme in history” but said he “loves” it regardless. Nonetheless, a good many Social Security supporters continue the falsehood about a trust fund overbrimming with money.

The trustees of the trust fund certainly recognize it has no economic value in an authentic sense. The bonds held in the fund are a sort of IOU, a measurement that in-dicates how much the government owes to the system, and which will have to be paid eventually by taxpayers. Even the left-wing Clinton administration’s budget officials understood this, pointing out in the 2000 budget that the trust fund balances “are available to finance future benefit payments and other Trust Fund expenditures — but only in a bookkeeping sense.... They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund ben-

efits. Instead, they are claims on the Trea-sury that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures. The existence of large Trust Fund balances, therefore, does not, by it-self, have any impact on the Government’s ability to pay benefits.”

This past year’s trustees for the Social Security and Medicare systems said in a similar fashion: “Neither the redemption of trust fund bonds, nor interest paid on those bonds, provides any new net income to the Treasury, which must finance re-demptions and interest payments through some combination of increased taxation, reductions in other government spending, or additional borrowing from the public.”

Meanwhile, those trustees say Social Security has a $7.9 trillion shortfall. This means “the program would require $7.9 trillion in cash — today! — to afford its promises.” By other calculations, arguably more realistic, the unfunded liabilities of the Social Security are closer to $16 tril-lion. That’s security?

The notion that the government can keep charging endlessly, spending beyond its means, without paying a pretty price is a costly fallacy, whether one is discuss-ing Social Security or other so-called en-titlements. According to the Congressio-nal Budget Office’s most recent 10-year baseline budget assumptions, by 2020, a full half of all the income tax revenue in the country will be needed just to pay the interest on a National Debt of $23 trillion.

We could cut benefits, but 50 million recipients are a lot of folks for spineless politicians to resist. Or we could raise taxes, but many young people are already doomed to paying more than they will ever get back in benefits, and the payroll tax is now the largest that is paid by most Americans. Or we could allow Americans to assume more choices and control over their own futures.

Unfortunately, if the past is a guide, the likeliest path will follow the direction cur-rently being taken by the White House and liberal establishment: Berate the opposition and be economical only with the truth. n

— williAm p. hoAr

Wrong,unfortunately: Even FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania (Obama worked for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge), said Obama had it wrong when he said Republican leadership was pushing to privatize Social Security.

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Facing more scrutiny than its leaders have ever wanted, the

Federal Reserve responded beginning in 2009 with a campaign designed to tell everything the Fed thinks the American people ought to know. How to do this? A series of comic books!

When comic books first ar-rived on the American scene, they were funny, or their pages were filled with the daring exploits of real or imagined heroes. Now, they’ve become a conduit for propaganda. The New York Fed, well known as the Federal Reserve system’s leading policymaker, has produced five very colorful 24-page comic books to explain everything the Fed would have us know about money, monetary policy, banking, inflation, and the Fed-eral Reserve itself. The title of each book starts with “The Story of … ” Each truly provides quite a story, but not important facts needed to begin pulling our nation out of its economic doldrums. Instead, readers are treated to a deceptive compilation of false-hoods — one story after another to keep Americans in the dark about truly serious matters.

These color-filled publications are not the first issued by the customarily stodgy New York Fed to promote itself. The artists it employed produced a similarly colorful and similarly unreli-able “The Story of Monetary Policy” in 1996. The Fed’s money manipulators must have been pleased with the reception given their earlier product. Hence, five more issued during the past 18 months.

Each is replete with falsehoods and distortions of reality clev-erly designed to keep Americans from knowing why the value of their dollars is shrinking, why the nation’s economic vitality is declining, and a great deal more.

The Story of Inflation begins, “The dictionary defines infla-tion as a substantial and continuing rise in the general price level.” That, of course, is as faulty a definition as the claim that wet streets cause rain. But note that the Fed placed the blame for this gross falsehood on the dictionary, not itself, meaning in part that reliance even on a dictionary isn’t always the wis-est course. The bulk of the pages in this booklet proceeds from that totally incorrect definition to shifting blame for inflation’s scourge away from the Fed toward a variety of other targets, such as business leaders not producing enough goods. For the record: Inflation is an increase in the quantity of currency (dol-lars) that lowers the value of all currency and results in what appears to be a rise in prices but, in reality, is a reflection of the declining value of everyone’s dollars.

Other than a counterfeiter, no one but the Federal Reserve sys-tem increases the supply of currency. But our government stops

at nothing to prevent private counterfeiting, while at the same time permitting the counterfeiting regularly practiced by the Fed.

After misinforming readers about inflation, another booklet dealing with this topic points out that “hyperinflation” is very bad. Is that supposed to be a revelation? It claims that the Fed is constantly fighting to keep inflation at an “acceptable” level. That’s like saying some amount of cancer is tolerable. The de-ception provided proceeds with assurance that the best way to measure inflation is to turn to the federal government’s con-sumer price index (CPI), not to the Fed’s flooding the nation with more unbacked paper currency.

The Story of Money relates a few basic truths about the his-tory of money and then concludes that the “job of the Federal Reserve System [is to] make sure that the U.S. money supply grows at the right rate.” Sadly, many Americans would accept that summation without question. But the kind of power held by the Fed enables it to create national booms and busts at will (al-though some busts, as now, cannot be controlled), cause praise or disapproval to be heaped on the nation’s leaders, and even af-fect the choices of America’s voters. It’s no surprise that none of this is admitted in the Fed’s colorful but deceitful presentation.

Another comic book tells us where the Fed supposedly gets its power: “The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to coin money, and Congress has decided to delegate that power to the Fed.” From “power to coin money” to power to create the Fed? Could any greater distortion of the Constitution exist? This same comic book stresses the importance of the Fed retaining its “independence.” What’s important to the Fed is secrecy. This is why no audit of the Fed has ever been conducted, and why the need for such an audit isn’t mentioned in any of the comic books.

Another book praises fractional reserve banking, itself a con-tributor to inflation. Still another claims that Fed independence is absolutely necessary so it can fight inflation without being bothered by Congress. It would make as much sense to say that burglars should become policemen.

For free copies of the Fed’s self-serving distortions of real-ity, each book invites everyone to go to www.newyorkfed.org/publications. Recommendation: Don’t share what you receive with unwary fellow citizens. n

Comic Books From the Federal Reserve


THElaSTWorDTHE LAST WORDBy John f. mcmAnuS

No one wants to see people suffer due to a lack of medical care, hence ObamaCare was sold as a reform measure to ensure that all can receive care.

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