The years 2001-2008 were difficult ones for me. Here are some of
the reasons why:
- two
layoffs from work
- excruciating
TMJD that made it very difficult to smile much less to talk or sing
- severe
tendinitis in my wrists and eye strain that made it very difficult to work
with a computer
- starting
a preschool business with my wife at exactly
the wrong time – at the beginning of the "Great Recession"
In 2008, as the economic crisis grew, President Bush began to
panic. He "abandoned free market principles to save the free market
system," and began government interventions, including the takeover of
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the bailout of AIG. He signed into law the
Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), and the US Treasury Department began
buying stock in banks that were deemed "too big to fail." These
economic interventions prevented adjustments that would have normally been made
to reallocate resources into a sustainable framework (through bankruptcy and
foreclosure procedures, mergers, and other forms of restructuring).
At the same time that Bush was laying the foundation for a
prolonged period of economic misery, his successor was preparing to build a
house of cards on that foundation. To review a little Obama history, here are
my favorite quotes from Barack and Michelle Obama during the 2008 presidential
campaign.
- January 2008 - Barack Obama:
"Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would
necessarily skyrocket."
- May 2008 - Michelle Obama:
"Barack knows that we are going to have to make sacrifices; we are
going to have to change our conversation; we're going to have to
change our traditions, our history;" (We're going to have
to change our history?!
Really?)
- July 2008 - Barack Obama:
"We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve
the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve
got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful,
just as strong, just as well-funded."
- October 12, 2008 - Barack Obama:
"I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody."
- October 30, 2008 - Barack Obama:
"We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of
America."
Time to cross my fingers and hope that he wasn't going to be as
bad as I expected. The mind-blowing opening days of Obama's first term proved
that he was not going to bring the kind of "change" that was really
needed. In fact, every day brought new evidence that he hadn't changed the
direction of government; he simply stepped on the accelerator to corrupt,
bigger, more intrusive government. Here are a few of the highlights...
- Obama
appointed Tim Geithner as Treasury
Secretary (despite having owed $25,970 in back taxes and interest, which
he conveniently paid on the same day as his nomination by Obama).
- Obama
appointed 17 lobbyists in his first
two weeks in office — breaking his campaign promise that he would not have
lobbyists and his administration. (He would later go as far as appointing General Electric CEO
Jeffrey Immelt himself as the "Jobs Czar," taking
crony capitalism to new heights.)
- After
promising to reform earmarks and eliminate wasteful
spening line-by-line, Obama signed into law the $787 billion "stimulus"
(revised to $825 billion) that was supposed to keep the unemployment rate
below 8% and the $410 billion Omnibus Spending bill
which had 8,570 earmarks worth $7.7 billion. He signed both of these bills
without the five day waiting period that
he had promised to allow the public to review bills.
After a mere two months, I had seen enough "hope,"
"change," and out-of-control government. I attended the first
"tea party" protest in Raleigh, NC on March 21, 2009, along with a
few hundred others who were fed up. What would that accomplish? I had no idea.
But I wasn't going to sit at home and say nothing.
The Obama Administration continued making "progress."
TIME Magazine had fancied Obama the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Obama
whole-heartedly embraced the role of economic meddler-in-chief, for example...
- The
insane Cash for Clunkers program incentivized the destruction
of wealth.
- The
Treasury Department initially refused to allow healthy banks to
repay TARP funds and exit the program.
- The
government took over GM and Chrysler
and gave preferential treatment to the United
Auto Workers. Rather than allowing GM and Chrysler to go
through a normal, structured bankruptcy, the Obama administration decided
to inject itself into the process. The administration violated normal
bankruptcy procedures and legal precedent, giving preferential treatment
to the UAW over the legally entitled bondholders, and insulating current
UAW members from renegotiation of union contracts, which would have
occurred in a normal bankruptcy.
After Obama left, as I walked back to my car still holding my
sign, a group of college students drove by and shouted "F@#$ YOU!" I
felt like that was a good summary of the reaction of Democrats (including Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer) to those
of us who opposed Obamacare. The divide between conservatives and
liberals/progressives in this country had never been more obvious.
Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky: "a public option will put the
private insurance industry out of business and lead to single-payer (government
healthcare)"
Public-option planner Jacob Hacker: "(the public option is) not a Trojan horse (for single-payer government healthcare), right. It's just right there! I'm telling you. We're going to get there, over time, slowly..."
Despite comments such as these from several Democrat leaders, it was
obvious that most Democrats either did not know, or did not care, that
Obamacare was intended to eventually lead to a complete government takeover of
healthcare. Public-option planner Jacob Hacker: "(the public option is) not a Trojan horse (for single-payer government healthcare), right. It's just right there! I'm telling you. We're going to get there, over time, slowly..."
More fired-up than ever, I took my family to the Taxpayer March on
Washington on September 12, 2009. I have never seen so many people in one place
in my entire life. Despite the legacy media's reports of tens of thousands of
people, it was plainly evident that there were hundreds of thousands, if not over a million,
people who had come to voice their displeasure at the direction the government
was heading. It took about 2 hours just for everybody to cross the starting
line of the march!
By this point, I had begun to go through my own fundamental
transformation. Reading The 5000 Year Leap by W. Cleon Skousen really put into
perspective how far America has drifted from its founding principles of limited
constitutional government, individual liberty, and individual responsibility.
Over one hundred years of progressive and socialist influence have taken their
toll, as the federal government has become ever larger and more intrusive. The
more I studied our history, the more I realized how deficient my public school
education had been in the subject of history.
- I
had never been taught about the Intercollegiate Socialist Society
(League for Industrial Democracy)
or the Marxist "Frankfurt School"
at Columbia University.
- I
had never heard the quote from FDR's Treasury Secrectary Henry Morgenthau,
Jr., admitting that New Deal stimulus spending was a
failure, saying: "We are spending more than we have ever
spent before and it does not work.... After eight years of this
administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started... and
an enormous debt to boot!"
- I
had never heard of the Wickard v. Filburn Supreme Court
decision that distorted the US Constitution's Commerce Clause
and allowed the federal government to regulate how much wheat a farmer
could grow on his own land even
if he wasn't trying to sell it!
I determined that my first step was to give my own children a
better education than what I received, and I started homeschooling them using a
classical education curriculum. As part of this process, I've spent countless
hours searching for the best supplemental resources, to give my own children
the best education that I can. Developing Restoring History.US is the next
logical step for me. It is my attempt at creating
culture, not just reacting
to it. I want to start sharing what I have found, and make it easier for other
parents to gather the resources that can make the study of history entertaining
and relevant.
Honestly, after a hundred years of progressivism (socialism,
modern American liberalism, statism, or whatever else you want to call it), I
see very little reason to be optimistic about America's future. The 2010 and
2012 elections brought several strong, principled conservative/libertarian
leaders to Congress, such as Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Justin Amash.
However, the balance of power in our government is overwhelmingly tilted toward
progressives — in both the Republican Party and, especially, in the Democrat
Party. We are well on our way to becoming an amoral, socialist police state.
Al
Sharpton: America voted for socialism
And, like it or not, we have the government that we deserve. The
quality of our representatives is a reflection of the people's morality,
education, and wisdom (or lack thereof). The continued reelection of people
like Democratic Representative Maxine Waters makes it clear that the state of
the electorate, from the perspective of the Founders, is abysmal. Many of our
respresentatives support socialist policies such as redistribution of wealth,
heavy government regulation, etc., but they can't actually use the
"S" word because it is still unpopular with many people.
Once in a while, you might hear a Democrat slip up, as Maxine
Waters so eloquently did during a Congressional hearing in 2008: "this liberal will be all about
socializin-... ... ... would be about... um... basically... taking over, and
the government running all of your companies." Or, as Al Sharpton
said, "The American public
overwhelmingly voted for socialism when they elected President Obama."
"ALL of you voted for me." — the president and the
media's joke is on us.
One thing that greatly bothers me about the election of President
Obama is his connections to radical leftists. His association with radical left-wing terrorist Bill Ayers
and Jeremiah Wright, Obama's racist, America-hating
pastor for 20 years, were discussed ad nauseam before the 2008
elections, but it made no difference to Obama supporters. Even more disturbing
is his connection with communist Frank Marshall Davis. The extent of their
relationship is certainly debatable, but I will stick to a few indisputable
facts here: - Obama
wrote about his mentor "Frank," who was an important influence
on Obama as an adolescent, in Dreams
from My Father, featuring him prominently, but never divulging
his last name.
- In
August 2008, published articles identified Frank
Marsall Davis as the "Frank" from Obama's youth. (Associated
Press 8/2/2008, followed by The
Telegraph 8/21/2008 and 8/22/2008)
- Frank Marsall Davis was a member of
Communist Party USA. (Davis’s 600-page FBI file listed Davis’s
Communist Party number: 47544.)
- Interestingly,
Obama abridged Dreams
from My Father when he recorded the audio version in 2005, and
every single mention of
"Frank" was purged.
Finally, reading Aftershock was another real
eye-opener for me, regarding the economic challenge we face as a country. It
was written by the same authors who wrote America's Bubble Economy in
2006, which predicted the subprime credit meltdown. In Aftershock, they estimate
that America's credit limit is likely somewhere between $15-$25 trillion
(Wiedemer, David, Robert A. Wiedemer, and Cindy Spitzer. Aftershock. Hoboken,
NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010, p. 80). This is the point at which foreigners
will no longer be willing to risk buying our bonds, and we will have to rely on
either spending cuts (causing a depression) or printing money (causing high
inflation). The latter option has already begun, as the Federal Reserve's
"quantitative easing" has more than tripled the BASE money supply from 2008 to 2013. The collapse of
our government debt bubble, which continues to grow, will likely be brutally
painful for most Americans.
Total U.S. Public
Debt
|
At
Bush inauguration (1/20/2001)
|
|
|
At
Obama inauguration (1/20/2009)
|
|
|
As of
1/14/2014
|
Draw your own conclusions about both Bush and Obama.
Conclusion
It is incredible for me to see how things lined up to allow me to
help homeschool our children and to work on this web site. If the things that I
perceived as "bad" (or devastating,
in some cases) had not happened, I would still be working a typical office job,
squeezing in some fun on the weekends, and voting every couple of years to feel
like I had done my civic duty.
As things turned out, these "bad" things forced me into a
non-traditional position. I am now a freelance software developer, with more
flexibility in my work than I ever dreamed possible. I have the opportunity to
help homeschool my children, which I find much more rewarding than anything I
could have imagined.
I have already gone through the stages of grieving over my
country. News headlines never shock me anymore. I do not put my hope and trust
in a government, and certainly not in any one man who some people have said is
"sort of God." But, while I see few
hopeful signs for America as a nation, I have profound hope as an individual. After several
years in my own personal "Babylon," I can say that I have experienced
God's plans to give me "hope and a future." (Jeremiah 29:11)
I am not fearful of America's economic future. The pursuit of
possessions, fancy vacations, and financial security (or the illusion of financial
security) no longer drive me. I no longer trust in my own health, wealth, and
abilities; instead, I place my trust in God.
"So
don’t worry about these things, saying, 'What will we eat? What will we drink?
What will we wear?' These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your
heavenly Father already knows all your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all
else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need." — Matthew 6:31-33 (NLT)
My focus now is not on things
but on people —
especially helping to equip young people for the future. I hope this site will
inspire the next generation to work toward "securing the blessings of
liberty" by exerting their own influence on American culture. Personal thanks to:
- Jesus Christ — for working all things together for
good in my life (Romans 8:28), even when it was impossible to see how
it would happen. Help me to be the proof of Your love.
- Sheree Johnston — my beautiful wife who has
stuck with me for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness
and in health. I love you more than ever, and I appreciate everything you
do for our family.
- Our parents — who have been incredibly supportive
as we have gone through the roller coaster of life for the past few years.
- Glenn Beck — who began the 9/12
Project in March 2009 and helped encourage
conservatives/libertarians that we could organize ourselves and have an
impact on the country.
- W. Cleon Skousen (1913 - 2006) — who authored The 5,000 Year Leap,
which was, by a wide margin, the single greatest influence on my
understanding of the Founding Fathers and the principles that guided them
in creating our republican government.
My Fundamental Transformation Updated 1/16/2014 12:48 PM by Steve Johnston , founder of RestoringHistory.US
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