They Have Found the Enemy and He is Us

Last Friday, Huffington Post featured an article under its "Green" section--Climate Study: Religious Belief in the Second Coming of Christ Could Slow Global Warming Action.   According to the article, 56% of Americans believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ, and this belief reduces the possibility of strongly believing that the government should take action on climate change by more than 12%.

Over the past twenty-one years, since the UN Earth Summit introduced Agenda 21 and first began a massive global push to rebuild our society into a new "green" utopia, the US has been enduring growing indoctrination that our way of life is bad, that we are using up the world's resources and that we need to consume less and live less well because by doing so, we will preserve the planet in better condition for future generations.

The Obama Administration has accelerated this push as much as possible.  I say as much as possible because although they have pushed the goals of Agenda 21 forward in every way that they were able to do so, the federal initiatives they hoped to pass, such as the Cap and Trade bill and Chris Dodd's Livable Communities Act, came under so much opposition that they could not be passed.  Instead, Agenda 21 is being implemented locally, one city at a time, as city after city greedily grabs federal funds to build roundabouts and invest in public transportation and build low income "Smart" housing in the downtown areas and to restore and renovate downtown at the expense of the suburbs.  On April 5th, I wrote about how the Obama Administration is cutting off funding for transportation projects that benefit the suburbs in favor of federal funding for environmentally-friendly sustainable housing projects.  Without a federal law mandating sustainable housing or "Smart Growth" the government has to resort to a carrot and stick approach.  While that has worked well in a lot of communities, such as El Paso, Texas, where we are currently investing $13 million in federal funds along with $14 million of state and local money to turn one of our main thoroughfares (North Mesa Street) into a Transportation Corridor for our notoriously inefficient city bus system,  in other areas the country is experiencing a growing backlash against Agenda 21, Smart Growth, sustainable living, and the inherent threats to private property, individual freedom and Constitutional rights that these represent.  Last June Alabama became the first state in the U.S. to pass a law outlawing implementation of Agenda 21 within its borders and banning membership of any of its cities or townships in ICLEI--the UN affiliated NGO charged with bringing Agenda 21 to local communities.  The state of Oklahoma is now in the process of passing its own legislation to outlaw participation in Agenda 21 and yesterday I saw that the legislature of Missouri is reviewing similar legislation.

We who believe in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ are not planet haters who want "dirty air and dirty water" as Sean Hannity so frequently says.  We don't litter garbage about with the attitude that our actions don't matter because the Lord is coming back soon and the earth will be burned up anyway.  Christians believe in stewardship and that includes stewardship of God's creation. But most of us who believe in the Second Coming do so because we have read the entire book of Revelations which also foretells a world government led by the Antichrist.  Whether we individually believe that the AntiChrist is an individual person or a world system or both, we know that it will bring genocide and destruction on a level never before experienced.  To believe in the Second Coming is to keep a watchful eye on world events at all times for signs that this world system may be coming to fruition.

During the Russian Revolution of 1917, while the students and intellectuals were celebrating Marxism and collectivism, the Russian peasants, the only religious block of people in the nation, were alarmed.  When the Communists ordered that the farms be collectivized, many of the peasants refused to do so because they believed that collectivism was a signal of the coming of the AntiChrist.  Because of their lack of cooperation, whole communities of them were imprisoned in their own houses and starved to death by the Communist government as a means of silencing the opposition.  Belief in the Second Coming and opposition to world systems that are at odds with the teachings of the Bible can and some times do have lethal consequences.

I was both interested and alarmed yesterday to read Erick Erickson's insightful Idols of Awesome and Shibboleths of Community in which he addresses "a crazy movement going on right now within young evangelical circles to shun the suburbs and engage in a 'new legalism' of radical faith."  Erickson's article makes some great points about unrealistic life expectations in the church, and I agree with a lot of them.  But I wonder at whether the "radical faith" movement is really about trying to be "awesome" as Erickson supposes, or whether it is about evangelical leaders trying to protect their position in a world moving toward globalism by preaching a vision that is pretty much in lock step with what Big Brother wants.

Christianity Today published an article in March of this year written by Matthew Lee Anderson entitled, Here Come the Radicals detailing how David Platt, Francis Chan, Shane Claiborne and Kyle Idleman are teaching "radical faith" and dominating the Christian bestseller lists by encouraging young believers to reject American materialism and middle class comforts in exchange for communal life and life in the inner city. Platt's book, Radical, released in May of 2010, was on the New York Times best-seller list for two years. At his encouragement, his church in Brook Hills, Alabama raised more than $525,000 for Compassion International's child survival programs. His book, according to the CT article, takes the American church to task for the culture of "self-advancement, self-esteem and self-sufficiency," and upbraids us for our "individualism, materialism and universalism."  His book, and Shane Claiborne' s The Irresistible Revolution, also strike out against American nationalism.

Look, as a life-long Christian--I asked Jesus to come into my life when I was five--I understand the conflict between balancing the demands of modern life and the call of Jesus to "come follow me."  And I also acknowledge that God, on occasion, calls individual people to leave their lives and go do something extraordinary for Him.  Our church supports a young woman who felt called by the Lord to go to the Philippines and start a mid-wifery clinic when she was about twenty years old.  Now, ten years later, she is still there and is living out her faith in practical ways to help poor women with no access to medical care. 

The danger of the radical faith movement is that it basically preaches the same dogma being currently trumpeted by the mainstream media and by the current leftist government and the progressive globalist movement worldwide.   1. The American way of life is bad.  2. American Nationalism is bad.  3. The middle class is bad. 4. Suburbs are bad, and  people who choose to live in suburbs are selfish.  The "radical faith" movement just files the goals and teachings of "radical environmentalism"  under the heading "Gospel" and adds the hashtag #WWJD.  And if I don't accept those ideas, I am not just an unworthy citizen of the planet who is greedily consuming the world's resources; I am probably not a "real" Christian at all.  If we are not willing to embrace radical faith, perhaps we don't have any faith and our whole Christian life is a lie.

This brand of Christianity conveniently ignores some very important truths:

1. American nationalism and specifically the U.S. Constitution protect the freedoms of every citizen, particularly in the areas of religious liberty and speech, and therefore allow the uninhibited growth of Christianity.  In countries where there are no constitutional protections, life for Christians is dangerous. For examples of life without these protections, think North Korea where 70,000 Christians are estimated to be imprisoned because of their faith, or Iran where Pastor Saeed is serving an eight year prison sentence in Evan prison for his work with evangelism.  Yet, Iranian president Ahmadinejad was one of the speakers last year at the Rio 20 conference which was the 20th anniversary follow up to the 1992 Earth Summit which birthed Agenda 21 and he is active in the UN's efforts to remake America.

2. The American way of life and prosperity which the "radical faith" theologians decry makes it possible for one congregation in Alabama to raise over half a million dollars for Compassion International.  Because of freedom and prosperity, America has been able to export Christian ideals and missionaries and aid throughout the world--a feat which would not be possible in their austere utopia.

3. The globalist movement currently underway to destroy the American middle class, rid our society of private property and single family housing in the suburbs,and force Americans into miserable crowded conditions in the inner cities, will not produce the levels of prosperity needed to maintain the lifestyles of evangelical leaders who are making themselves rich on books peddling poverty as a virtue.

What the Church, and this country needs, is something really radical--pastors and people who stand up for Freedom and the Constitution and property rights as gifts from God rather than liabilities to be discarded so that we can have greater personal growth.  Real stewardship is protecting and preserving those rights and passing them on to the next generation along with our faith so that those who follow us can live and work and worship in freedom just as we have and so that they can have the opportunities that freedom affords to live their lives as they believe that God is calling them to do as individuals..  2 Corinthians 3:17, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."  The pastors in this country who are willing to teach this message are the true revolutionaries.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

Whatever Happened to the Human Race?

In 1979, the modern Christian theologian Dr. Francis Schaeffer and the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C.Everett Koop co-authored a book titled, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?. Published within the decade that saw the legalization of abortion on demand through Roe vs. Wade, the book explored the premise that acceptance of abortion leads to a general devaluation of human life on at all levels.  Abortion leads to infanticide, which leads to euthanasia, which eventually leads to genocide.  Schaeffer and Koop wrote,

We are concerned that there is not more protest, outcry, or activism in regard to these issues of life and death. We can even recognize that there are people who are led to starve children to death because they think they are doing something helpful for society. Lacking an absolute ethical standard, they have only the concept of what they think is beneficial for society to guide them. But we cannot understand why other people, those with a moral base--and we know there are many of them--do not cry out. We are concerned about this because, when the first German aged, infirm and retarded were killed in gas chambers, there was likewise no perceptible outcry from the medical profession or from an apathetic population.  It was not far from there to Auschwitz.

I read Whatever Happened to the Human Race over twenty years ago, but I have been reminded of it in the last few days watching the events surrounding the Kermit Gosnell trial.  Anyone who has followed this trial at all knows that Gosnell is the 71-year old abortion doctor and proprietor of the "Women's Medical Center" in Philadelphia who is on trial for murder of infants born alive and at least one adult patient.  Various workers in the clinics have testified that when infants survived the abortion procedure, Gosnell snipped their spinal cords or in some cases slit their throats.  Jack McMahon, Gosnell's attorney, argues that although Gosnell did perform abortions past the 24 week limit written into the state's statute, not one of the babies he is accused of harming was over 24 weeks and there is no evidence that any of them was born alive.  His arguments persuaded the judge in the case to throw out three of the infant murder counts against Gosnell for "Baby A, "Baby B" and "Baby C" as well as five counts of corpse abuse. (Apparently, babies were kept in jars and their feet and sometimes entire legs were severed and preserved as well. Multiple babies appeared in photographs which showed their upper spinal columns had been cut in order to snip the spinal cords.)  Four remaining counts of infanticide and one count of murder of an adult remained against Gosnell on Tuesday, April 23 after the judge's ruling.

Yesterday, in an apparent about-face, the judge reinstated the murder charge for "Baby C".  "Baby C" survived its abortion procedure, and according testimony by clinic workers, was laid on a counter where it lived for twenty minutes and moved its arms.  Workers testify that they "played" with the baby by pulling on its arms and watching it pull back before killing it.

The outcome of this hideous trial and Gosnell's ultimate fate remain to be seen but the reaction to it by our society reveals a lot about how far we have fallen morally.  The mainstream press has remained silent on a trial that is one of the most grisly, scandalous, and shocking of my lifetime.  I have seen photos of the empty courtroom seats reserved for the press.  When Gosnell announced this week that he would not take the stand in his own defense, Huffington Post actually made that a headline.  But when the judge reinstated the murder charge for a baby brutally murdered after twenty minutes of life, I saw the update on my Twitter feed because TheBlaze.com had covered the story.  The disgusting, macabre details of this man's crimes are the stuff of nightmares, but in a society where grisly, bloody violence sells almost as well as sex, and people will pay high ticket prices to see slasher movies like the "Saw" series, nobody wants to talk about Kermit Gosnell.

Why?  I have seen some conservative commentators speculate that the media does not want to cover the Gosnell trial because it shows abortion for what it really is--murder.  That's part of it; but it really is only a part of media black out of this story.  The other part is that our society is rapidly morphing into the society that Schaeffer and Koop predicted and feared--a society without compassion, without empathy, without concern.  We are fearsomely close to pre-Nazi Germany in our attitudes about the value of human life.

In 1949, Leo Alexander, a psychiatrist from Boston who had been consultant to the Secretary of War and had served with the office of the Chief Council for War Crimes in Nuremberg from 1946-1947, wrote a paper titled, "Medical Science Under Dictatorship."  He writes that before Hitler became the German Chancellor in 1933, a barrage of indoctrination had already begun against, "traditional, compassionate nineteenth century attitudes against the chronically ill, and for the adoption of a utilitarian, Hegelian point of view."  This propaganda spread everywhere, from mass entertainment, as in a German film called, I Accuse in which the husband of a woman suffering from life-long multiple sclerosis finally euthanizes her while a sympathetic colleague plays the piano softly in another room, to the public education system which included high school textbooks such as Mathematics in the Service of Political Education, 2nd edition 1935, 3rd edition 1936, which included "problems stated in distorted terms of the cost of caring for and rehabilitating the chronically sick and crippled.  One of the problems asked, for instance,  is how many new housing units could be built, and how many marriage-allowance loans could be given to newly-wed couples for the amount of money it cost the state to care for 'the crippled and insane.'" In other words, the German people were fed a steady diet of a philosophy that some lives are not as important as others, and that the less worthy lives were draining funds which could be used for the happiness of those more deserving than they.

Hitler did not issue the first euthanasia order until 1939, after the German people had received a sufficiently steady diet of this philosophy to no longer object.  The organization that he established to kill children under the Third Reich was called Realm's Committee for Scientific Approach to Severe Illness Due to Heredity and Constitution.  Patients who were being killed were transported by "The Charitable Transport Company for the Sick" which billed their relatives for the cost of their extermination while falsifying the death certificates so that they would not understand how their loved ones had actually died.  Leo Alexander tells us, "It all started with the acceptance of the attitude that there is such a thing as a life that is not worthy to be lived."  From there, Hitler was able to kill more than 9 million people in Europe.

What does all of this have to do Kermit Gosnell?  Very simply, I believe that the media black out of the Gosnell trial has less to do with protecting the abortion industry than it does with an overall move to retrain our society away from respect for life and the sanctity of life and towards an overall apathy and callousness toward the deaths of others.  We are now seeing our own media propaganda in this direction.  In the last twenty four months, I have seen an episode of  The Mentalist in which a regular character who is dying of cancer decides to commit suicide and asks the show's main character, Patrick Jane, to stay with him while he dies so that he will not be alone.  Although Jane is at first very uncomfortable with this request, he does stay and performs sleight of hand coin tricks to distract the dying man until his life ebbs away.  Criminal Minds last year featured an episode in which the ex-wife of one of the main characters also finds out that she is terminally ill and decides to commit suicide and asks that her ex-husband stay with her while she is dying.  Again, he is uncomfortable, but she has already consumed a fatal dose of some toxin, and so he compassionately holds her while she expires.  I want to note that in neither one of these shows did the principle character do anything to actively kill the person who died or to actually assist in the suicide, but the overall message was that they were compassionate good people by respecting the other person's right to die and by being a friend and not interfering.  This is the first step in saying that death can be preferable to life.

There are going to be a lot of other steps.  Next year many parts of The Affordable Care Act  will be fully implemented.  This coverage was supposed to provide every American with full access to health care regardless of health issues or pre-existing conditions.  Are we still so naive that we really think that a government who can't manage to pay the air-traffic controllers in order to avoid long delays at the airport will be able to cover the cost of every American's healthcare?  Even Democrats like Max Baucus are now calling the Affordable Care Act a "train wreck".  What the Act will do is force Americans to think in terms of which lives are worth saving.   The oft mocked "death panels" are a necessity when a society of finite resources takes it upon itself to make health choices for every person. As Alexander points out, "It is important to realize that this infinitely small wedged-in lever from which all this entire trend of the mind [the German mass euthanasia program] received its impetus was the attitude towards the nonrehabilitable sick."  When we as a society have to start making these decisions what will we choose?  Should healthy young people not be able to get as many benefits from the government because public resources are being used to treat people with chronic illnesses, or seniors with cancer?  How many scholarships could be given to our best and our brightest if the money were not being spent caring for the "crippled and insane"?  And so it begins.

Whatever happened to the human race?  The Germans could have chosen not to listen to the propaganda.  They could have chosen to reject Hitler and his social engineering and ethnic cleansing in favor of respect for all life and protection for all people.  They didn't.  The choice is now ours.  Will more of us stand against Kermit Gosnell, not just for the sake of the 8 original infants he was charged with murdering and the many, many more who died as the course of his normal practice, but because we understand that more is at stake than the life of a 71 year old abortion doctor in Philadelphia and his victims?  Will we allow ourselves to be lulled into apathy ("Those babies weren't wanted anyway.  Who would have taken care of them if they had lived?")  Hitler succeeded in his genocide in large part because German people from every walk of life supported him and furthered his goals.  If the Germans had refused to participate, they could have stopped the Holocaust before it began.  What will we do?

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her newest novel, The Chosen, about one small group of Americans' fight to restore the Constitution and end indefinite detentions without trial, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

Sustainable Development, Agenda 21 and how the Obama Administration is Using Housing Policies to Shape America

The big story this week, besides the threats of imminent annihilation from North Korea, is the apparent push from the White House to encourage banks to loosen the current mortgage credit restrictions.  So much media attention has been given to this that an uninformed observer would believe that the federal government is really working to expand homeownership back to pre-2008 levels.

I think this narrative, and the conservative furor/backlash being heard on conservative news shows like Hannity, is exactly the story that the White House wants the press reporting.  By having this narrative in the media, the White House can make a case for a populist push to force "bad greedy banks" to make more loans to deserving Americans who have had their credit damaged during the recession, and they can make conservatives who oppose them out to be heartless bad guys.  In reality, the true story of mortgage lending is very different than either side of this issue is reporting. 

The truth is that the qualified mortgage standards being implemented next year will shut between 15% (according to the CFPB's estimates) and 40% (according to the QM critics estimates) of potential homeowners out of the market completely.  Much is being made of the fact that FHA allows credit scores as low as 500, and down payments as low at 3.5%.  In fact, most banks will not make an FHA loan without a credit score of at least 600 and many require 620 or 640. But new guidelines expected to be released in the next few months will raise downpayment guidelines for qualified residential mortgages up to 10%.  While Fannie, Freddie and FHA have a seven year exemption before the loans they make have to qualify under the new guidelines, many mortgage professionals are looking ahead to the end of the seven years at a massive mortgage and housing constriction when the new guidelines are fully implemented for all lending types.  And in the immediate future, the implementation of the Qualifed Mortgages and the Qualified Residential Mortgages and the 3% cap on points and fees next year is going to cut off access to mortgage credit and to mortgage credit providers. 

So why is the Administration talking out of both sides of its mouth on this issue?  Very simply, the Obama Administration wants to discourage private ownership, especially in the suburbs, and wants to encourage "sustainable development"--densely packed urban areas reminiscent of Manhattan.  The problem is that Americans like homeownership, we like cars and we like suburbs.  So the Administration does not want to say in a public forum that they are actively working against these aspects of American life.  Instead, they have pushed through massive pieces of legislation such as Dodd Frank that contain thousands of pages of still to be written regulations that endanger private homeownership while they publicly claim to want to help Americans buy their own homes.

On March 18th, the National Review Online's Stanley Kurtz wrote an opinion piece entitled "Obama's Plans for the Suburbs: And How to Stop Them."  On March 15, President Obama spoke at the Argonne National Laboratory and proposed $2 billion on an energy security trust fund for renewable fuel research and as part of the speech he promised "to shift our cars entirely...off oil"  As Kurtz noted in his column, even the New York Times was skeptical since the President did not provide any real details as to how he would accomplish this.

On that same day, however, the Department of Energy released a series of reports called "Transportation Energy Futures" which outline a plan to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 80% by 2050.  Part of this report includes "the effects of the built environment on transportation."  This report is a blueprint for restricting development in suburbs.  Proponents of "smart growth" and "sustainability" hate the suburbs because they represent individual housing and private transportation, both of which are at odds with the United Nation's Agenda 21,an aggressive environmental blueprint to dramatically change the living conditions of the world.  Agenda 21 has been in various stages of implementation on the local level for over 20 years as cities and communities embrace Smart Growth, but the Obama Administration is dedicated to using federal resources to stop suburban development, to limit private automobile ownership and to force Americans into small tightly packed apartments to and from which they will either walk or use public transportation. 

To achieve this, the Department of Energy report recommends two policy options which are most likely to encourage dense development without exceeding the federal government's current authority.  The first requires eliminating the home mortgage interest deduction, which is perceived to incentivize many people to purchase homes who would not otherwise do so.  The second is to tie future federal aid, federal grants, and federal funding to "Smart Growth" projects.  The DOE suggests that federal funding for schools and roads could be forced to pass a population density litmus test which would mean that suburbs would not qualify for these funds. 

Kurtz also notes that on March 15th--the same day of Obama's speech at Argonne and the DOE report-- Bloomberg reported that the Obama Administration has announced plans to order all federal agencies to consider global warming before approving large projects.  As the Bloomberg report notes, this strategy could block highway construction and suburban development projects.

I agree with much of Kurtz's article, but I think he is overlooking some key factors.  First, he states that he does not believe that the mortgage interest deduction will be done away with.  That may or may not be true--but after spending 15 years in the housing industry I believe that tax exempt interest is a secondary consideration in whether people purchase homes.  Homeownership is the American dream, and for many Americans being able to write the interest off their taxes is not a primary incentive to buy--it is an added perk of doing so.  However, Obama already has a cadre of weapons in his legislative arsenal to stop the growth of the suburbs.  The new qualified and qualified residential mortgages are going to ultimately have such a great effect on who can purchase and who cannot and how much they can purchase that additional disincentives to purchasing single family homes will probably not be necessary.  Smart Growth and Sustainable development policies tend to make housing much more expensive. In Portland last year, the new "affordable housing" urban project was a one-bedroom condo selling downtown for around $160,000. The new qualified mortgage guidelines state that a borrower's total debt cannot exceed 43% of his or her total income.  What many do not seem to realize is that lenders, who are afraid of punitive government actions, have already placed serious limits on how much income they will consider for a borrower.  For instance, last Christmas I was working on a loan for a man who had been a self-employed attorney for 30 years.  Because he was retiring, his income was declining from year to year, although he still earned more than enough money to more than meet all of his current obligations and buy a small investment property.  But the lender did not want to be accused of making a mortgage loan to a person who did not "qualify" so they had a rule that if the income were declining for two years in a row, regardless of the current income filed on the taxes or the overall ability of the person to meet his financial obligations--they would not allow us to consider any of his self-employment income.  In the case of the attorney, the only income the underwriter would consider was just his fixed Social Security monthly income. 

Such practices are going to cause many self-employed or under employed Americans to not qualify to purchase housing period.   Americans who have had their hours cut due to the economy or Obamacare or who are working more than one job to make ends meet are going to have an increasingly difficult time qualifying.  Millions of others are going to qualify for such low loan amounts that all they will be able to afford is a small urban condo.  The Obama Administration does not have to make controversial public policies regarding housing--they just have to continue writing regulations which make it impossible for average Americans to afford homes.

The other part of this "carrot and stick" approach to implementing Smart Growth is also already happening through federal grants for sustainable projects.  Kurtz points out that House Republicans blocked funding for the Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grants in 2012.  However, as he also mentions, there are a lot of grants out there now that builders and developers can use to build "Smart Growth" projects.

Consider "Block 21" in Aurora Colorado, a new mixed use urban housing project being built for the low, low price of $160 million through a joint partnership of Waveland Ventures LLC, Jackson Street Holdings LLC, and Arrival Partners LLC.  The project includes a six story 200 room four star hotel (the brand will be announced later this month) with a pool and fitness center and a 30,000 square foot meeting room.  It also features a four-story apartment complex with 100 units, a club house and a swimming pool, and 10,000 square feet of ground level retail space. Like all "Sustainable" communities, Block 21 will also feature the "Quadrangle" a heavily landscaped urban park.

The developers tell us that "Block 21" is named for Army hospital 21, a World War I hospital that once stood at the medical complex adjacent to the new development.  Perhaps that is true, but it is an amazing coincidence that the name invokes images of Agenda 21, the United Nations aggressive environmental initiative which calls for "human settlements" very much like Block 21.  

The most interesting part of Block 21 is the financing source.  According to RE Business online, Waveland Communtity Development, a wholly owned subsidiary of Waveland Ventures, has received $312 million in tax credits since 2007.  In addition to tax credits for Block 21, Waveland has also secured a commitment for the senior debt via the Federal EB5 program to finance the project.

That's exactly how this works--starve funds from the projects the government wants to kill and supply funds to the projects the government wants to promote.  As Smart Growth projects are incentivized with tax credits and federal funding we are going to see more Smart Growth developments and less and less financing for suburbs.  And as individual borrowers can no longer qualify to purchase homes in the suburbs, we will see more and more of these homes and ultimately more suburban communities going first into foreclosure, and then descending into "blight" only to be ultimately bulldozed and destroyed just as happened last year in Ohio with homes that could not be sold.

In his article, Kurtz recommends that Americans get involved in the process and let their Congressional 

Representatives know that they need to block funding for Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grants.  That is a good start.  Another good start is to support candidates who are informed about Agenda 21 and the threat that it poses to American freedom and the American way of life and to support only those candidates who stand against it.  A third is to stop falling into the trap of pretending that lending and mortgages are evils of the 21st century.  As long as Americans continue to pretend that cutting off access to credit is doing our country a favor, we are playing right into the hands of the politicians who are remaking our society into one in which private property and single family home ownership no longer exist--a society where everyone lives and works exactly where the government tells them to. That is not the future that I want to leave to the next generation.  What about you?

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

Minimum Wage and Maximum Earnings--Opposite Sides of the Same Coin

About ten years ago I attended a spring time regulatory conference for the National Association of Mortgage Brokers.  During these conferences, which were held in Washington DC and which always concluded with a grassroots lobby day on Capitol Hill, we heard various invited speakers.  During this particular conference, one of the speakers who had been invited to meet with our group was a consumer advocate attorney who decried the fact that some borrowers paid higher interest rates for credit than did others.

The attorney began by lecturing us softly, "Wouldn't it be great if everyone could have a 7% interest rate?"  At the time that this conference took place, the optimal rates for borrowers with good credit were probably between 5.8 and 6.5% so the consumer advocate assumed that she had padded the prime market interest rates enough to make them attainable to all.

Immediately, some of the men in our group stood up and took turns at the microphone which had been provided to facilitate audience interaction so that they could explain why it was not possible for everyone to have a 7% interest rate.  Interest rates are based on both credit history (demonstrated history of paying one's bills) and credit depth (length of time accounts have been opened, number of accounts, type of accounts, etc.) as well as ability to prove income, employment, consistency of employment, length of employment, debt ratios and other factors which make loans more or less risky.  Riskier loans have higher interest rates and less risky loans have lower interest rates.  (At the time this conference was held there were a lot of loan products on the market, including stated income and no income loans).

After listening to reasons that her proposal was ridiculous and unworkable, the attorney responded, "Okay, okay.  What if it were a 15% interest rate?  It doesn't matter what the interest rate is, so long as it is the same for everyone." 

The consumer advocate attorney was blissfully unaware that inherent in the "unfairness" of higher rates for some borrowers and lower rates for others is a system of built in rewards for desired behavior.  If her suggestion were to be implemented and everyone got the same rate regardless of their credit profile or work history or savings history, responsible borrowers would no longer see any benefit to carefully managing their finances and irresponsible consumers would have no incentive to improve their credit rating, or to try to hang on that job longer in order to get a better work history, or to save some money for a rainy day.  If everyone gets the same reward regardless of their level of effort or initiative, no one gets much of anything and no one has any motivation to try to improve their situation.

I was reminded of this today as I saw Elizabeth Warren's comments made last week in front a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pension began circulating conservative news sites and the Internet.  During the course of the hearing, Senator Warren wondered allowed why minimum wage isn't $22.00 an hour, adding that it would be if it had kept pace with the growth of the economy since 1960.

Since the State of the Union when President Obama called for raising the minimum wage to $9.00 an hour, I have read numerous commentaries about the problems that will be caused by increasing minimum wage.  Many of these have been well written and researched, and they make valid points that higher minimum wage cuts jobs for entry level workers, does nothing to substantially help those in poverty--many of whom actually do not work at all--and ultimately hurts the business that create jobs and provide the economic growth in this country.  Beyond these arguments, however, I believe that the push to increase minimum wage to higher and higher levels belies another huge issue that I have not heard anyone discuss--the desire for the government to determine and regulate how much everyone can make.

For that reason, I found it particularly interesting that Elizabeth Warren would propose that minimum wage should be $22.00 an hour.  Remember that before Warren was a freshman Senator from Massachusetts, she was the interim director for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the massive new government agency created by Dodd Frank.  She was also one of the architects behind Dodd Frank, which created extensive new regulations for financial services and the mortgage industry, including regulating the maximum amount of compensation that mortgage loan originators can earn.  Over the past two years, experienced originators have left the mortgage industry as the government has limited compensation more and more.  Those restrictions began as regulations saying that originators cannot be paid by both the borrower and the lender, making it illegal for brokers to negotiate individual fees with borrowers.  Next year, in 2014, the provisions of the Dodd Frank bill that mandate a set cap on fees and points will be implemented.  As a result of these rules, many experienced originators have left and are continuing to leave the mortgage industry, leaving newer and less experienced originators in the marketplace. 

The problem with setting maximum compensation for a profession is that it accomplishes very much the same effect as saying that every person should get the same interest rate.  A free market system contains built in incentives for hard work, education, additional training, personal growth and long hours.  Professionals who are willing to apply themselves, to get the additional training they need and to work the additional hours do so in the hopes of reaping financial rewards for that extra labor.  But to liberals like Elizabeth Warren, being able to command higher fees for a greater level of expertise is not good business--it is cheating.  To Warren, a loan originator with 20 years experience, numerous certifications and a track record of closing thousands of loans is no more valuable to the consumer than a newly licensed originator working on her first loan.  They are the same and they should receive the same compensation.

Over the past three years that I have been writing this blog I have warned several times that the mortgage and real estate industries were a proving ground for policies that liberals plan to implement in industries across the board.  Now that Warren is in Senator, she can advocate for $22.00 an hour minimum wage just as she advocated for capping our compensation at levels so low that experienced originators cannot keep our doors open as independent business people.  By arguing that entry level employees should be making over $45,000 a year to flip hamburgers or answer the telephone, she is really saying that experience, hard work and education do not have any compensatory value. 

To the socialist mindset, this argument makes perfect sense.  To have a system where harder working, better educated, more competent people make more money than those who are less skilled or less well educated or less ambitious is inherently discriminatory.  (And when I speak of education here, I am not only referring to formal education through degrees--I am also referring to industry specific training which is often expensive to obtain.)  The solution to this discrimination is to raise the minimum wage and lower the maximum compensation--both through higher taxes and through regulations which set caps on compensation.  By narrowing the wage gap between the entry level and the experienced professional, liberals remove any incentive to work harder or to become better trained.  But, then again, to liberals the issue is not really how much anyone makes, so long as everyone makes the same amount.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

Rejecting Big Government and Common Core Standards in Favor of Parental Rights

Last week Glenn Beck's pantomime of giving triage to a dying Lady Liberty while she lay bleeding and gasping on the floor of his studio went viral across the conservative internet.  Beck finished his pantomime by admonishing parents to get their kids out of government schools because the schools are turning the kids against the parents.

Beck is exactly right about this; one of the reasons that our country is sliding so far to the left is that progressive social engineering has been happening in this country for over 40 years. Now, however, social engineering is accelerating to a whole new level as the Common Core Standards are implemented across the country. 

In today's column, conservative blogger and bestselling author Michelle Malkin explains that Big Government wants to control not only what your children learn, but how they process it, respond to it and feel about it.  They also want to be able to track your children's behaviours, attitudes, likes and dislikes from infancy through high school graduation, and use that information both for research and for profit.  Malkin cites a Department of Education report which underscores that the true intention of Common Core Standards is not to make sure that all children learn, but that the Federal Government has a firm grip on exactly what attitudes, beliefs and concepts the children leave school with.  States Malkin,

"The DOE report exposes the big lie that Common Core is about raising academic standards by revealing its progressive designs to measure and track children’s “competencies” in “recognizing bias in sources,” “flexibility,” “cultural awareness and competence,” “appreciation for diversity,” “empathy,” “perspective taking, trust (and) service orientation.” 

Read Malkin's full article, which also contains a link to Glenn Beck's recent work on CCS, here.

In an era when our young people are graduating from school with minimal skills and competencies, but a strong foundation in liberalism, sex ed, and socialism, it is outrageous that politicians in both parties are pushing the Common Core Standards and this new federal tracking of students attitudes and behaviours.  The CCS, along with President Obama's new push for universal preschool, the folly of which has been explained in today's Morning Bell, are designed to ensure that the government can get fully inside the head of every kid in America starting at age 4 and lasting through high school.  Children who have been indoctrinated into this system are foundational to the liberal, socialist, godless society that our federal educational system has been building for the last generation. 

After the 2012 elections, I saw Charles Krauthammer interviewed on Fox News.  He was asked whether he believed that the young people who voted for Barack Obama the second time were a permanent block of reliable liberal voters.  He responded that normally people become more conservative as they get older--as they get married and get jobs and mortgages and have children of their own, the desire for universal welfare is commonly replaced by the desire for lower tax brackets.  Traditionally what Krauthammer says has been true; young radicals grow into middle aged accountants with values that more closely resemble their parents. But in the case of the new generation that is growing up, I think Krauthammer's formula no longer applies.  The 60's hippies were rebelling against a "plastic culture".  They understood the values of their parents--they just rejected them only to find out that liberal, leftist politics work better in theory than in practice.  Unlike the previous generations of young people who grew up, got married, got jobs and cut their hair, this new generation is actually not rebelling against anything.  They have been programmed and engineered into an odd conglomeration of Peter Pan, Fifty Shades of Grey and Karl Marx.  They have been taught that they should never have to work, be responsible, or grow up, that socialism is good and capitalism is bad, that intolerance is the only sin a person can commit and that traditional family structures are old-fashioned, boring, repressive, and no fun.  People so indoctrinated at such an early age cannot "grow up" to be conservative, responsible adults--they don't even have a concept of what that means.  Children who start out at age four in government daycare, spend their formative years in a completely socialist system, and then spend their college years enjoying "Sex week" at major universities are going to emerge so damaged ,that they will never rehabilitate into stable, productive, hard working Americans who support freedom and independence.  (This is the 21st century "Jedi Mind Meld" that Obama complained two weeks ago that he could not use on Congress and Senate.  Progessives know that they just have to be patient--they cannot change the attitudes of "set in our ways" freedom loving conservatives, but if they can get control of our children, they can make us as extinct as the dinosaur within one generation.)

And that takes me back to Beck's speech about getting kids out of the public school system.  I am a product of homeschooling--my mother homeschooled me and my nine younger brothers and sisters starting in 1975, before the word "homeschooling" had even been coined.  We did not meet another homeschooling family until I was fourteen years old.  We used accredited correspondence schools and skipped no grades whatsoever, but each of us had a master's degree from California State University before our seventeenth birthdays--completely educated by a very hard working woman with only a high school diploma whose previous work experience consisted of being a secretary.

Homeschooling provides students with a completely different world view than that held by people in public or private schools.  Today there are estimates of between 2 and 6 million homeschoolers in this country, including second generation homeschoolers such as my nieces and nephews.  This block represents a small but significant segment of people who have been taught to think outside of the system. Homeschooling by parents who really want to not only educate their children but shape their character and prevent their indoctrination into the "New World Order" is the best hope that this country has for salvaging its future.

Homeschoolers beware, however, because the federal government's Common Core Standards are coming to a textbook near you. Many companies that sell textbooks to homeschoolers have signed on to the Common Core Standards.  Last week, homeschooling mother and conservative advocate Tina Hollenbeck began contacting companies that sell textbooks to homeschoolers to find out whether their companies were not aligned with CCS, were coincidentally aligned, or were consciously aligned.  She has compiled three lists which are now available on her website which you can visit here.  Her website also contains a link to her Facebook group.

If you just simply cannot homeschool, you can still opt out of the Federal database tracking system being implemented through the Common Core System.  Malkin's blog references a form that parents can sign and submit to school districts to protect the privacy of their children and prevent the federal government and major corporations from tracking their kids through school. This will at least protect their privacy, though it won't do much to protect their minds. 

If you are interested in homeschooling, numerous resources are available to help you get started.  The time and the money you will spend are not just an investment in your children--it is an investment in America's future, which is currently hanging in the balance.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her newest novel, The Chosen, about one small group of Americans' fight to restore the Constitution and end indefinite detentions without trial, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

King John, the Bill of Rights, and Assassination by Drone

When I was in school, I read a poem entitled, "King John and the Abbot of Canterbury".  The poem relates how the Abbot of Canterbury was a kind and generous and loved man, who was well respected throughout England.  He was also one of the wealthiest men in England--wealthier than King John himself. The king became increasingly enraged by stories of the Abbot's goodness, kindness and generosity, and he coveted the Abbot's wealth, so one day he summoned the Abbot to appear before him in court. When the Abbot arrived, the king told him that he must return to court in three days time to answer three questions for the king. If the Abbot failed to appear or if he were unable to correctly answer each question, he would immediately be executed and all of his wealth and property would be forfeited to the king.  Following were the three questions for which King John demanded answers:

• Question 1:  How long, to the minute, will the king live? 
• Question 2: How much, to the penny, is the king worth as he sits on the throne with the  royal crown on his head? 
• Question 3: What was the king thinking while the Abbot was answering the first two questions?

In the poem, the Abbot leaves the court in dismay and immediately travels to England's greatest scholars to try to find the answers to the questions.  He goes to the universities--he travels to Cambridge and to Oxford, he asks the wise men of the church, but everywhere he goes, he hears only that no one can answer such questions for another person.  Finally, at the end of the second day, he arrives back at his estate grief-stricken because he knows he will die the following day, and he is greeted by a faithful servant who tells the Abbot that he can answer each question for the King, and persuads the Abbot to allow him to go in his place to face King John.

I have been reminded of that poem several times lately as our government has reauthorized indefinite detention of U.S. citizens under the NDAA and most recently when the Attorney-General announced last week that the Administration does have the authority to kill American ciitzens on U.S. soil using drones.  Yesterday, Senator Rand Paul spent more than 12 hours filibustering CIA nominee John Brennan's nomination simply to make the point that no Administration should have power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process.  Paul made some excellent points, including the one that once we give up our rights and freedoms, we cannot expect to get them back. 

What amazes me about the filibuster is that any American cannot see clearly that drone attacks against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil are an egregious violation of our Constitutional rights.  Yet, this morning the Wall Street Journal attacked Paul for his "political stunt" saying that he had managed to rally "libertarian  college students in their dorm rooms."  How demeaning and insulting!  I stayed at work an extra hour last night to send #standwithrand tweets so that he would know that, like millions of Americans, I appreciate what he is doing on behalf of liberty.  I am certainly not a libertarian and I have not been a college student in over 20 years. The men and women with whom I interacted on Twitter last night were largely people like me--working professionals who care about the Constitution, freedom and the Bill of Rights.  Regardless of what the WSJ, Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham like to pretend, we are not a mindless army of anarchists.  We know that in a free society, the government must operate under the boundaries of its own laws.  No person can be above the rule of law--not the Attorney-General, not the president of the United States, not anyone.

Our founding fathers understood this principle all too well.  They had lived in a society where the king was above the law--his whims and wishes trumped any written legislation.  While the story of King John and the Abbot of Canterbury is almost definitely fiction, it highlights the real abuses committed by King John against his subjects--abuses so severe that finally his nobles forced him to sign the Magna Carta guaranteeing some rights and protections to some portions of society.  While the Magna Carta granted very limited protections, the document became the basis for the concept that the king is not above the law, and that concept became the basis for our Constitution and Bill of Rights.  Each right we are guaranteed in the Bill of Rights--the right to freedom of speech, of assembly, of religion, the right to freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, the right to trial by jury, the right of due process, the right to keep and bear arms--all were guaranteed to us by people who understood what it meant to have no rights.  They wrote down our freedoms for us so that we could learn them and live under them. 

Today we have a society that has been free for so long that we have lost sight of what it means not to be free.  When the current Administration tells the American people that a senior level official should have the right to examine the evidence and determine whether to assassinate a particular person, an alarming number of people in this country seem to think that this is acceptable.  Many leaders of both parties, and many in the press, seem to believe that this power of assassination or imprisonment without trial would never be abused or used to destroy a person who was not guilty of a serious crime against the country and who did not pose an imminent threat to its security.  History suggests the opposite.  From the Old Testament Story of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, who murdered their neighbor Naboth and stole his vineyard because they coveted his property and he refused to sell it, to more modern examples of citizens living in the Soviet Union during the Stalin years who reported fellow citizens as traitors to the government and had them executed to get their apartments, history teaches that people are often motivated by greed, pride, envy, lust and a desire for personal gratification and that these are often the driving forces in their decisions to execute another person. What is to stop the "senior official" from killing the rival for his lover's attention, or executing the owner of a home he wants, or assassinating any person who stands between him and some desired goal. Perhaps, as in the case of King John and the Abbot, envy could be the sole basis for determining that a certain individual or group of individuals was a threat, or, as in the case of most tyrants, an honest disagreement with a certain policy or idea could target a particular individual for termination.  Due process and a trial by jury system is of paramount importance in a world where selfishness, greed and anger are basic human instincts.

Today, Jay Carney reluctantly read a statement from Eric Holder informing the American people that drone strikes are to be restrained under the guidelines of the Constitution and that the President does not have the power to assassinate non-combatant Americans on U.S. soil.  I applaud Rand Paul and the fourteen Senators who stood with him yesterday in getting this admission out of the White House.  As Paul said in his statement following Carney's announcement, "under duress and public humiliation" the White House decided to uphold the law.  I am just disappointed that it took a 12 hour filibuster to get the White House to admit that it has a legal obligation to uphold the Constitution, and I am saddened that on the day after the filibuster so many Americans do not seem to understand the importance of protecting and defending this document that was created to protect and defend each of us.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her newest novel, The Chosen, about one small group of Americans' fight to restore the Constitution and end indefinite detentions without trial, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

The Absurdity of the Sequester Crisis

What do you think is the single biggest problem with government today?  I know that is an open-ended question that could generate pages of responses since there are so many clear problems with our government. But as I have watched and lived through the massive regulations of the past four years, I have come to believe that the biggest problem with our government is that we have two sets of rules--one for politicians and the other for everybody else.

Two days from now, the sequester is about to go into effect which will cut $85 billion over 10 years from a budget that will still be larger than the federal government's 2012 budget.  I have spent the last few days watching and reading various commentaries on the sequester--ABC News reports that the sequester will lead to longer lines at the airport, cuts to Head Start, cuts to education, cuts to defense, and on and on.  A few days ago, the Administration released non-violent illegal immigrants awaiting hearings to drive home the consequences of budget cuts to federal law enforcement.  Much of this is an obvious attempt to create a public outcry against the government being forced to cut its budget by 2.3%.  Unfortunately for Washington, no outcry is coming.  The American people are fed up--we simply don't care that it's finally the government's turn to make do with less money than it would like to have.

I have also read some excellent commentaries on the fact that the all Americans were subjected to a 2% payroll tax increase in January of this year, so we all have to make do with 2% less money than we had last year.  Yes, agencies may not be able to hire so many employees; yes, they may have to furlough employees.  So what?  Government workers earn an average of 16% more than workers in the private sector.  In a climate where many businesses are struggling and millions of Americans remain unemployed, no one is going to shed any tears over a federal employee being furloughed.  At least they have an excellent job to go back to as soon as the furlough ends. 

Another possibly horrific consequence of the sequester--Congress might not be able to travel free on military jets as a result of defense cut spending.  According to Air Force Secretary Michael Donley at the Air Force Association's Winter Conference, the reduced military budget might not allow for free transport of Congressmen and women.  That would truly be sad--they might have to fly business class where they would stand in the lines created by TSA and sit next to their own constituents during flights to and from their districts. This might, however, have the positive effect of increasing business class air travel if people knew that they might actually have an opportunity to speak face to face to their elected representatives since anyone who has ever lobbied on a grassroots level knows that these people are virtually impossible to contact directly by phone or email and often do not see visitors from their districts who travel to their DC offices to meet with them.

What is hypocritical about the weeping and wailing over the cuts brought on by the sequester is that the same government officials who are warning that the Apocalypse is about to begin have spent the last four years imposing draconian regulations dictating how much private businesses can earn.  In the mortgage industry, for example, two years ago the government implemented regulations mandating that a self-employed loan originator could no longer be paid both by the consumer and by the lender to whom he sold the mortgage loan. At that time, many experienced originators left the market, because the government had cut their pay.  Last year, the government again cut the pay of originators--this time indirectly--through ruling against Wells Fargo in a discrimination case.  In that case, the government determined that because some brokers had charged higher fees to some minority borrowers than had other brokers, Wells Fargo's policies, while not intentionally discriminatory, had a "disparate impact" on potential borrowers and therefore Wells Fargo was guilty of discrimination. The immediate effect of this ruling was that many lenders (including Wells Fargo) stopped working with independent loan originators completely, and those who remained changed our contracts effectively reducing how much we can earn once again.  Now, in January, the CFPB announced its new rule federally capping all fees on qualified mortgages at 3% in a move that will finish destroying what is left of the independent mortgage market. 

All of these regulations were touted as necessary for the protection of the consumer.  Mortgage brokers were apparently charging too much money and their customers did not understand the hundreds of pages of forms provided to them to explain their costs and fees.  In order to protect the consumer from being overcharged, the new regulations had to be implemented.  No one ever protested, "But mortgage brokers with many years of experience have financial obligations--homes, mortgages of their own, children in school, debt, office expenses, payroll, etc. They have entered into those obligations based on past earnings. If we cut their incomes how will they meet those obligations?  How we can expect them to do the same level of work they are doing now for substantially less money?  What if they can't earn enough money to meet their expenses and they are forced into bankruptcy or foreclosure?"  Rather, the bureaucrats who made these rules were smugly confident that what they were doing was for the greater good.  The businesses they affected would just have to learn how to make do with less.

Now, it's the government's turn to experience some cuts--cuts they imposed on themselves, apparently thinking that when the time came they would never have to actually live under them.  President Obama believes that the American public should rush to the government's defense and accept more tax increases--further reductions to our own income--in order to prevent any reductions to the government's budget.  To make his case, he calls the cuts "brutal" and "severe" and warns that they will "eviscerate" key segments of the economy.  In doing so, he is using the same reactionary strategy that he has successfully used several times in the past--the world is about to end, the wolf is at the door, and we are all going to die unless we acquiesce.  Apparently, Obama never read the story of the boy who cried wolf or he would know that this particular strategy only works so many times before the people stop listening.  I think that's where we are today.

While the mainstream media and the government want to pretend that a 2.3% reduction in the federal  budget will mean the end of the world as we know it,  the truth is that it's time the government learned how to adjust its spending and live within its means.  If that means some pain for the agencies and employees, so be it.  We the people need to let Washington know that the cuts imposed by sequester are necessary for the protection of the taxpayer--we are doing it for the greater good.  The government will just have to learn how to make do with less.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned Me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.