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Authors: Newt Gingrich

Tags: #Politics, #Non-Fiction

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BOOK: To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine
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Americans traditionally believed that elected officials served the people and were obligated to listen to them. “No taxation without
representation” was really a battle cry insisting that free people have the right to temporarily loan power to elected officials. In contrast, because the secular-socialist Left cannot win by proclaiming their real goals, they resort to dishonesty to ram through their agenda. They represent the worst aspects of a Chicago-style political machine combined with the greatest political corruption ever seen in modern America.
Given this enormous gulf between historic America and the secular socialists, it’s clear that if the Left stay in power, they will transform America into a radically different nation—a union-dominated, bureaucratically controlled, high-tax, low-growth country. Powerful politicians will impose their will on an exhausted, submissive citizenry, who will look to government bureaucrats for guidance and permission to succeed in life. Naturally, there will be no place for God in this new, purely secular society.
As my daughter, the columnist Jackie Cushman, wrote, “We were told to vote for change we could believe in and found we had elected people who wanted to change what we believe.”
The America in which we grew up is vastly different from the America the secular-socialist Left want to create. And that’s why saving America is the fundamental challenge of our time. The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.
This diagnosis may strike some readers as alarmist. But this book will show just how radical, how corrupt, and how ruthless the Left have become. You will also see why the term “secular-socialist machine” is the only honest way to describe the Left’s ideology and the way they operate today.
Time has not run out, but it is running short. It’s up to those of us who love our country to save America from the destructive, irreversible transformation that the Left have in store for us.
CHAPTER ONE
Who We Are
 
 
 
F
or the first time since the Civil War, we as Americans have to ask the most fundamental question possible: “Who are we?” In 1861 that question related to whether the American Experiment was to be dissolved, whether one-half of our country was to perpetuate the institution of slavery, or whether we, as a united country, were going to abolish it.
Today, we face a challenge equally grave: whether the United States as we know it will cease to exist. I’m not talking—not yet—about the threat of terrorism, or of the growing power of China, or about any other external threat. I’m talking about losing what defines us as Americans.
Most of us know who we are. We know that America is an exceptional country with a unique genius for combining freedom and order, strength and compassion, religious faith and religious tolerance. But
today we have given power in Washington and in state capitols nationwide to a radical left-wing elite that does not believe in American exceptionalism. Barack Obama has told us so. When he was asked by a
Financial Times
reporter whether he believed in American exceptionalism, he replied, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
In other words, everything we cherish about America, our president thinks is not so very special, not so very different from any other country. That’s why he and his supporters feel free to change our country as they see fit, to use all the levers of federal power to annex our healthcare system to the federal government, to act as if the bureaucracy—not the private sector—is the great job creator, to make America a more socialist, more secular society.
To put it plainly, America is facing an existential threat—and it comes from a movement that fundamentally rejects the traditional American conception of who we are. No longer, in the Left’s view, are we the Americans of the frontier, the sturdy, independent farmers; no longer are we America the capitalist colossus serving as the arsenal of democracy; no longer are we the America that believes our liberty is an unalienable right that comes from God. All this, the secular socialist wants to deny—and is denying—in favor of a secular, bureaucratic society guided by government elites.
Overall, the fundamental definition of what it means to be American is being undermined and distorted by the values, attitudes, and actions of the secular-socialist machine.
This brings us back to the essential question: who are we? By this, I mean what are America’s basic values and traditions, and what ideals have successfully guided us in the past? By contrasting these historic American attitudes with the alien, destructive values the Left are now imposing on us, we can develop solid principles that should guide our efforts to rescue our country from secular socialism.
The fundamental difference between historic American ideals and those of the secular-socialist Left can be seen in ten conflicting values:
1. Work versus theft
2. Productivity versus union work rules and bureaucracy
3. Elected representation versus bureaucrats and judges
4. Honesty versus corruption
5. Low taxes with limited government versus high taxes with big government
6. Private property versus government controls
7. Localism versus Washington control
8. American energy versus environmental extremism
9. Conflict resolution versus litigation
10. Religious belief versus secular oppression
Any one of these conflicts represents clashing values on the most basic level. Taken collectively, they indicate two irreconcilable worldviews that, in the long run, cannot coexist in the American system. Eventually one of these value systems will defeat and replace the other—and that time will come sooner rather than later. If we lose this struggle, the America of our fathers and forefathers will be forever lost, giving way to a secular-socialist machine that will never relinquish power of its own accord.
1. Work Versus Theft
The work ethic is so central to the American experience that it was already being emphasized over 400 years ago, in 1607, during the very first summer of English-speaking colonization in Jamestown, Virginia. When wealthy aristocrats told Captain John Smith they did not have to work, he replied with a dictate reminiscent of St. Paul’s second epistle to the Thessalonians: “This is a new
world and we can’t afford to carry people who won’t work. If you don’t work you won’t eat.”
Thus, from its earliest days, America was based on a simple proposition: people should work hard, and in return they could keep the fruits of their labor.
There is a vivid contrast between a free, work-oriented society and the dependency-dishonesty model of Soviet Communism—and to some extent of the left-wing welfare state. Soviet workers had a motto: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” Americans had a remarkably different slogan: “An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.” America today is still filled with small businesses, self-employed people, professionals, and others who live by that principle every day.
Because we are self-reliant and operate in markets where people won’t pay us if we cheat, Americans have created an environment where honesty pays. In contrast, the secular-socialist machine, with its commitment to a socialist vision of wealth redistribution, has undermined the very concept of “an honest day’s work,” especially through its union power. In fact, it spreads the opposite ethic: game the system to get as many benefits as you can while working as little as possible.
A typical example is the Long Island Railroad. According to a September 2008
New York Times
investigation, nearly every career employee of the Long Island Railroad is approved for disability payments shortly after retiring.
1
In one recent year, 97 percent of all new retirees applied for and received disability, part of a scam that has cost taxpayers at least $250 million since 2000.
Here’s another example: at the heavily unionized Big 3 auto makers in Detroit—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—thousands of workers were paid not to work. They were part of a United Auto Workers “jobs bank” plan to keep them as dues paying members even if they did nothing productive. According to Mark Perry, an
economics professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, the jobs bank program cost the Big 3 automakers more than $4 billion between 2005 and 2008.
2
With these kind of union “deals,” is it any wonder the auto companies got in such trouble?
The Post Office, which is suffering from a $7 billion deficit, has a similar program called “standby time” that pays a large group of employees more than a million dollars a week to do nothing.
3
Union rules prevent the Post Office from laying off redundant workers.
Worse, New York City has “rubber rooms” to house teachers who are so incompetent they can’t be allowed to teach children. Yet because of their union contract, it takes up to
seven years
to fire them, so in the meantime they are paid to sit in a room and do nothing. This act of theft—taking something for nothing—costs New York City schools about $65 million a year, which should be spent on educating children.
4
Or consider today’s typical mode of school attendance certification. Students are officially counted two or three times a year, and the results determine how much the school gets paid for the rest of the year. On these counting days, some schools hold “pizza days” or adopt other gimmicks to encourage maximum attendance. After that, attendance can be dramatically lower because it does not affect the school’s payments.
Clearly, we need reforms to restore the traditional work ethic. And it can be done. Just imagine a reform movement that insists:
1. You should only get disability if you really deserve it.
2. You should only get paid if you actually work.
3. Teachers who can’t be allowed near students should be removed from the payroll.
4. Every teacher should report actual attendance electronically every hour (a method McDonald’s uses to report every sale in its 37,000 stores worldwide), and
schools will only get paid for students who actually attend class.
Think what would happen if these kinds of reforms spread throughout the entire economy—once again, we would live by “an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.”
One thing’s for sure: these reforms would provoke bitter resistance from those members of the machine who profit from the status quo. Their source of income might be called cheating or extortion (like New York’s rubber-room teachers); it might even be considered theft in some cases (such as lying to get disability or workmen’s comp). But they consider it “their” money, and they think they’re entitled to it.
The people who live off your taxes without doing an honest day’s work understand exactly what they’re doing. They are beating the system. And if you advocate reforms that threaten their lifestyle, they’ll try to beat you, too.
2. Productivity Versus Union Work Rules and Bureaucracy
From the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to victory over Japan in August 1945, America won World War II in three years and eight months. That’s the traditional, can-do America.
In contrast, it recently took twenty-three years to add a fifth run-way to the Atlanta airport. More strikingly, we still have not rebuilt the World Trade Center more than eight years after it was destroyed. That’s bureaucratic America.
The father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt, understood the danger of paralysis posed by a unionized, bureaucratic government. In 1937, he explained how government employee unions must be held to a different standard than private ones:
All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. . . . The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.
5
Unfortunately, FDR’s Democratic descendants have ignored his wise counsel. Today, can-do America is being steadily eroded by its bureaucratic counterpart. America is now so tied up in regulations, litigation, and bureaucratic rules that key sectors of our economy—especially energy exploration—are becoming stagnant.
Consider
New York Times
columnist Tom Friedman, who continually laments America’s inability to match China’s speed in developing large-scale projects. Yet, he cannot understand that the U.S. government bureaucracies he admires and the liberal policies he supports are the very heart of the problem.
For example, President Obama needed emergency stimulus money so fast that no one in Congress had time to read the $787 billion stimulus bill. Then that legislation met the federal bureaucracy. Consider the example of “fast track” green energy projects which, despite their name, still have to go through a multi-layered environmental impact and public review process. According to the website of the Bureau of Land Management (which handles green energy projects for the Department of the Interior), these projects could
“potentially” be cleared for approval to receive stimulus funds by December 2010, almost
two years
after the stimulus was passed.
Still, Friedman is correct that China is developing quickly. When my wife Callista and I were in China in August 2009, it was clear the Chinese were heavily investing in building the world’s largest and most efficient high-speed train system. They are determined to connect all their major cities with 215-mile-per-hour trains.
6
BOOK: To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine
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