PAT BUCHANAN 'S Mea Culpa

I have heard Pat Buchanan talking up his new book. He indicates that there is a perfect storm of problems that may sink the American State. Below are the bullet points that he has been pushing and my answers.


"America is in an existential crisis from which the nation may not survive." Democracy is always precarious. But the threat to democracies is always greater from the fear within than outside forces.

The U.S. Army is breaking and is too small to meet America’s global commitments. It is not the case that the military is too small; rather the commitments are to large. If the military sticks to defending essential America, from Sea to Shining Sea it is plenty large. The problem is that the military is being ask to defend not American interests but the profits of the multinational corporations.

The dollar has sunk to historic lows and is being abandoned by foreign governments. You had a war, tax cuts and the feds kept interest rates low to help the Republicans. I know that the Republicans are going to say that this was unforeseeable. Unforeseeable only if you are a dolt. Someone had to buy all those treasury bonds.

U.S. manufacturing is being hollowed out. The President been saying the economy is good, look at the stock market. Americans have been looking at median income. Looking at income distribution. The cultural over head is too high. That cultural overhead is outrageous corporate profit, executive pay and corporate raiders. 20 years of marauding barbarians raiding the productive parts of society. Loosened on society by the anti-regulation forces in the Republican party; the direct result of the Reagan Revolution ably abetted by PAT BUCHANAN. One can only assume that the book is a Mea Culpa

The second part is the demographics. Even responsible corporations would not look to build plants with a 30 year time horizon in a place with a dwindling work force.

The greatest invasion in history, from the Third World, is swamping the ethno-cultural core of the country, leading to Balkanization and the loss of the Southwest to Mexico. The threat from Mexico is pretty limited. As for the invasion, we have an illegal employer problem not an illegal immigrant problem. The minute employers are truly and significantly liable for hiring undocumented workers; the problem will go away. You don't find a big undocumented workers problem in the government sector. Is that because government is far more efficient than the private sector? Or is it that the private sector is intentionally exploiting undocumented workers. The falling dollar should begin to ameliorate the problem. As the dollar falls the amount of money that the undocumented workers can send back falls. Decreasing the incentive to work here.


The culture is collapsing and the nation is being deconstructed along the lines of race and class. Who started Class and Race war ? Willy Horton anyone. Scary brown people from south of the border. Welfare moms driving Cadillacs. All false fears stirred by the Republicans to distract the attention from the largest transfer of wealth in our nations history to the top .5% of American.

This is the cultural overhead. Excessive cultural overhead lead to the fall of Russia(supporting a bloated army and an inefficient bureaucracy) France (Louis the 16th) and the list goes on.

A fiscal crisis looms as the unfunded mandates of Social Security and Medicare remain unaddressed. I love this red herring. If we only had saved more we would be OK. This is a demographic problem not a financial problem. Remember money is how you keep score it does not actually make everyones life better.Japan and Europe have already faced the problem. Both less than totally successful.

Japan had one of the worlds highest savings rate; this did not save them. They kept all immigrants out while the economy collapsed for lack of young people. They have been in a decade long recession. Europe took a different tract. They went for the guest workers program. The result an underclass of people without a country. Leading to social upheaval.

The US has a short time frame to get this right. Make sure that we have productive workers who have a stake in this country...legal immigration. That makes the pie bigger so that the amount you have to take off for retirees and the disabled is palatable. We won't do it as long as we are busy waving brown people around to scare people.

All these crises are hitting America at once -- a perfect storm of crises.

Buchanan see a bunch of problems, that are really just symptoms of two larger problems. He is like a gardener hacking at the Bamboo shoots and not digging out the roots.

One is the high cultural overhead of supporting the barbarian corporations. We have any over extended military that is being used to support profitability. At home these same corporations are capturing the very government entity that are suppose to regulate them. Leading to billions of dollars in losses. All taxes paid by lower 98% percentile of tax payers go to government contractors. The corporations export jobs and will do what ever they can to lower labor wages here.

The second is the demographic problems created by the baby boom. While as a nation we are just starting to see this problem. Parts of rural America have been experiencing it for 20 years. The solution has been immigrant labor. I remember the Red River Valley of Minnesota in 1986. The collapsing population was supplemented by the influx of Hispanics. This did not lead to the collapse of America any more than the Irish, German, Polish, Italian migrations that came before.

The solutions are easy. Corporations are not citizens. They have no right to bribe congress and the president. Immediately tax all corporate donations to candidates at 1000%. Immediately expand legal immigration to fill jobs, but make employers accept unions as the price for hiring these laborers. That way they will only ask for immigrants for jobs that they truly can not fill with current citizens.

If your definition of America is Anglo-Saxon Protestants it may have collapsed along time ago. If your ideal of America is people who cherish personal freedom then it may not be to late to save it. But know that the people who threaten America are not the "scary brown people" but rather the people who are peddling fear to distract you from the real issues.