Get Rid of the Gate Crashers

I just got this e-mail.  I don't know who Tom Moody is or if he is real.  I don't care---whoever wrote this is spot on.  All I know is that if Tom Moody is real, I want to shake his hand.  It's about time someone put this whole illegal (again, I ask, as I have for 20 years, doesn't illegal mean unlawful?) immigrant fiasco into a useful analogy that even a smart guy like Zero can understand.

A4 Driver

Subject: TERRIFIC ANALOGY
Terrific analogy!!


 If you had tickets to a sports event, concert, Disneyland, or on an airplane, and when you got to your assigned seat, and someone else was in that seat, what would you do? You would call for a person in charge of ticket checking and have the person in your seat removed.  You would be properly asked to show your ticket, and you would gladly and proudly do so, for you have bought and paid for that seat.  The person in your seat would also be asked for a ticket, and they would not be able to produce one.  They would be
called “gate crashers” and they would be properly removed.

Now in this huge stadium called the USA we have had millions of gate crashers. We have been asking security to check for tickets and remove the gate crashers.  We have been asking security to have better controls in checking at the door.  We have asked security to lock the back doors.  Security has failed us.  They are still looking the other way.  They are afraid to ask to see the tickets.  Many people say
there is unlimited seating, and whether there is or not,  no one should be allowed in for free while the rest of us pay full price!

In section AZ, of Stadium USA, we have had enough of the failures of Security.  We have decided to do our own ticket checking, and properly remove those who do not have tickets.  Now it seems very strange to me
that so many people in the other 49 sections, and even many in our own section do not want tickets checked, or even be asked to show their ticket!  Even the head of Security is chastising us, while not doing his own job which he has sworn to do.

My own ticket has been bought and paid for so I am going to proudly show it when asked to do so.  I have a right to my seat, and I want the gate crashers to be asked to show their tickets too.  The only reason that I can imagine anyone objecting to being asked for their ticket is that they are in favor of gate crashing, and all of the illegal activities that go with it.  Such as drug smuggling, gang wars, murder, human smuggling for profit, and many more illegal and inhumane acts that we are trying to prevent with our new legislation.  Is that what I am hearing from all of the protestors such as Phoenix Mayor Gordon, US Rep. Grijalva, even President
Obama?  If you are not in favor of showing tickets, (proof of citizenship, passport, green card, or other legal document) when asked, as I would proudly do, then you must be condoning those illegal activities.

Tom Moody

United States citizen

Keep An Eye on Your 401K

I just ran across this article from Personal Liberty Digest from last February which was written before Zerocare was passed by Congress and signed into law.  With the advent of the Zerocare bill, this subject of using mandatory retirement finds to shore up the Treasuries is even more of a possibility.  This has been kept under the radar but you can just imagine the drooling that is taking place in Zero's administration as they anticipate the possibilities of getting their hands on that money flow.  Watch every move they make and stay vigilant---I DO NOT want the government telling me how and where to invest.  Neither should you.  


A4 Driver

Will Obama Nationalize U.S. Pensions?

February 18, 2010 by Robert E. Bauman J.D.

Will President Barack Obama nationalize United States pensions? That was the serious question I proposed one year ago in my blog—and it’s time to ask that question again.

Why now? Because President Obama has proposed what one of our experts sees as the "first step in stealth nationalization and forced investment of our retirement benefits."

The bad news comes as part of a tax package said to be aimed at middle-income Americans that was revealed in Obama’s State of the Union speech, as reported by Business Week magazine.

Obama’s stealth proposal is billed by him as an "effort to increase retirement savings by requiring all businesses to offer automatic IRA accounts,” but it drew immediate opposition from U.S. small business associations. Obama claims the plan would let employees automatically enroll in direct-deposit retirement accounts and expand matching tax credits.

Dangerous First Step to Nationalization

But Larry C. Grossman, CFP, CIMA, managing director of Sovereign International Pension Services (no relation to Sovereign Society) and a member of our Sovereign Society Council of Experts, sees the Obama idea as a dangerous move.

Says Grossman, "If you read it closely you will see the heart of the proposal is the requirement to keep 10 percent of the funds in U.S. Treasuries. At the stroke of a pen the president has found a way to bolster the declining demand for Treasuries. I believe forcing retirement plans into U.S. government control is the next step."

This alarm was echoed by Ron Holland, editor of the Inner Circle Intelligence Report published by BFI Consulting AG, a Swiss financial advisory firm, and a long-time member of the Sovereign Society Council of Experts.

Says Holland, "I think the mandatory IRAs just proposed by Obama is the first step in stealth nationalization and forced investment of our retirement benefits to support the U.S. Treasury debt market."

Should you be worried about this latest radical Obama move?

There is an estimated $15 trillion worth of private retirement plans in the United States; $4 trillion in IRAs alone; this constitutes 35 percent of all private assets in America. That is what the Obama government is eyeing to help plug the multi-trillion dollar deficit in his big spending budget.

You could call this move Obama’s attempt to "pull an Argentina."

What’s “An Argentina?”

In October 2008, Argentine President Cristina Kirchner—a peronista—confiscated US$30 billion worth in that country’s 10 privately managed pension funds. This was presented as an emergency measure to meet her faltering government’s financing costs. The Argentine congress went along with this radical property grab of individual retirement accounts, 401Ks and the like.

Could this happen in America?

Grossman’s opinion, "There have been several different academic papers published which have given rise to rumors. At least one congressional hearing on nationalizing pensions has been held. It is difficult to decide in what form it would take if something like this occurred in the U.S. Many believe that if indeed this is approaching, the best way to protect your assets is to place your retirement funds offshore now."

Holland says, "I believe we must fight this proposal and similar plans or else the private retirement system and our retirement wealth will be history in a few short years." Ron has produced a special report on this radical grab entitled, The Obama Retirement Trap Has Started!

Act Now

In my opinion, adopting such a retirement confiscation policy would be another major blow to Americans’ confidence and to any chance of economic recovery. It would further devalue the dollar and it would destroy what little remains of the credibility of Obama and his socialist government.

Folks, I served in the U.S. Congress when Democrats were overwhelmingly in control. I’ve seen what happens when the Republicans are in charge, as well. Meaning simply, anything can happen—so hold on to your wallet… and your retirement account!

—Robert J. Bauman, JD

Why the U S Will Go Broke

As I have said before, Bill Bonner of Agora Financial just has a way to put the whole economic danger zone into proper perspective.  This article has some funny parts and I want to laugh but the whole situation is so tragic and untenable it makes me want to cry.


A4 Driver

Bill Bonner

Bill Bonner Reckoning from Baltimore, Maryland... The lies that bind... News Flash: WASHINGTON (AP) - Consumer spending rose in March by the largest amount in five months but the gains were financed out of savings, which fell to the lowest level in 18 months. A slight rise in incomes added to concerns that the recovery could weaken unless income growth increases more rapidly. This is supposed to be a recovery. Everyone thinks it's a recovery. All the papers say so. Investors are betting on it. Politicians and economists are congratulating themselves for it. The only trouble is, the things that need to recover so that there can be a genuine recovery are not recovering. On the surface... Monster.com says the job situation is improving. Case & Shiller say the housing market is improving. Yesterday's news also told us that Europe has agreed to bail out its problem child, Greece. The New York Times: ATHENS - Greece announced on Sunday that it had reached agreement on a long-delayed financial rescue package that would require years of painful belt-tightening, but the deal might not be enough to stop the spread of economic contagion to other European countries with mounting debts and troubled economies. The bailout, which was worked out over weeks of negotiations with the International Monetary Fund and Greece's European partners, calls for 110 billion euros, or $146 billion, in loans over the next three years intended to avoid a debt default. And so, on the back of this good news, the Dow recovered what it had lost on Friday. Oil traded at $86. And gold edged up 2 bucks. Up, down, up, down - suddenly, the stock market seems nervous. Maybe it is beginning to realize that the recovery story is a lie...a fake- out... We have a feeling that the present volatility is going to be resolved by a decisive move to the downside. So, we'll keep our 'Crash Alert' flag up the pole for a bit longer. Of course, we've been wrong about the timing before. And if we're wrong this time, don't bother to send us an email. Some of the world's most important fortunes have been preserved by selling too soon. We won't mind being a bit premature again. "This recovery has nothing in common with typical post-war recoveries," we told our audience in Las Vegas on Saturday, "because the recession has nothing in common with the garden-variety recessions of the post- war period. This time it's different..." Which is to say, this time it's the same...it's coming back to normal...not getting more bizarre. In the meantime, unemployment benefits have been extended three times. Now, they're going to expire with some 15 million people out of work. The first-time house-buyer credit has expired too. And the feds have already shot off their monetary and fiscal ammunition... They've already used more stimulus than any time government ever used. And what did we get for it? After $8 trillion worth of banking and financial guarantees...plus deficits greater than any the country has seen since WWII... ..all we get is a small upturn in the key figures. They're still terrible. They're just not getting terribler...at least, not right now. What do you expect? The figures can't do down forever. They've got to turn up. But they look more consistent with a zombie economy and a long, drawn-out correction than with a real, robust recovery... But wait. The government keeps track of these things, doesn't it? And it reported on Friday that the US GDP grew at an annual rate of 3.2% during the first quarter. Well, well, well...guess that settles it. We are wrong again. Recession is over. Break out the champagne. That makes three quarters in a row with positive GDP growth. But hold on... The GDP number is just another one of the lies that bind investors and consumers to bad ideas and keep them coming back to bad habits. More on that later in the week... ......What does it mean when the financial intelligentsia seems to have no idea what is going on? It means they've got the wrong idea about the way things work...and probably no incentive to have the right one. Goldman Sachs had 21 billion reasons to think it was a good idea to bail out AIG. The bankers who hold Greek debt have 146 billion reasons to like the bailout announced yesterday. And the US government has about 2 trillion reasons to believe the economy is growing. [As we explained yesterday], there were 8,000 billion numbers between Hank Paulson's estimate of how much taxpayers' money would be put at risk rescuing Wall Street and the actual fact. But Hank Paulson is by no means the only major authority or financial celebrity to be wrong. The folks running money for Harvard and Yale - the crème de la crème of financial managers - were spectacularly wrong too. And so were the people running major banks. But today I will mention just one of them...someone who had already settled up when the financial crisis of '07-09 arrived. Walter Wriston was the Chairman of Citibank...the bank that eventually got taken over the federal government in the general panic of 2008...he remarked that: "Governments can't go broke." And here I'll do a little speculation - I bet that Citibank would NOT have had to seek government support if it had been run by a historian. Financial history is full of government bankruptcies. The first modern nation to go broke was Spain - which did so 4 times in the 16th century. The book by Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhardt has a nice list of these state bankruptcies. You'll see there are dozens of them. Some countries seem to be bankrupt all the time. Greece, for example. According to Rogoff and Reinhardt, Greece has been in default about every other year since it gained its independence in the 1820s. And I'll offer you a prediction, before this decade is over...or perhaps the next one...dozens of countries will go broke, including the United States of America. I don't mean they will close down and go out of business. But they will default on their debts - either by ceasing payment, by forced restructuring, or by intentional inflation. How do I know that? Well, I don't. It's just a guess. And it's a guess that comes from reading history...not from doing mathematics. Generally, as I told an audience in India, we seem to be at some major inflation point. I call this period the Great Correction, because it appears that there are several things that are in the process...or perhaps only the very beginning...of being corrected. 1. There is the 50+ year credit expansion - centered in the US...largely a product of the modern, numbers-oriented way of looking at economics 2. There is the bull market in stocks, begun in 1982...correction began in 2000 and still is not fully realized. That bull market too owed a lot to modern financial thinking 3. There is the 28-year-old bull market in bonds, which apparently came to an end in the fall of 2008...but has not yet been completed. Again, this was made possible and sustained by the financial ideas of the mid- 20th century 4. There is even a 400-year boom in Anglo-Saxon culture - backed by military and economic force - which may be beginning a correction too. And it wouldn't surprise you to know that these new, modern financial theories are almost entirely the product of Anglo-Saxon academics... All of these things are connected. The common thread is the 5th thing that needs to be corrected...and the thing I'm going to focus on here today. It's the rise of a body of thought concerning the way the world works - at least the world of money - which began in England and then was developed in the United States... ..on Friday, I called it "Fab Finance" after the Frenchman who got charged with fraud by the SEC. The idea is to put together slimy packages of debt and sell them to people who don't know what's in them. "Lumps for Chumps," you might call it. Poor Fabulous Fab got stuck in the hot seat, but he was only following the logical development of a whole body of thinking that dates back almost 100 years.... ..and which now seems to be leading the world to something much bigger and much more dangerous than just blowing up a few hedge funds and German banks... Now, practically all the world's countries are using Fab Finance. They're gradually absorbing all the world's financial risks and putting them on the public accounts...ultimately backed by the full faith and credit of the United States of America. This year, governments around the globe will issue $4.5 trillion in debt - three times the average over the last 5 years. About $2 trillion of that will be issued by the US. What's more, there is NO EXIT from this debt build up. Only about 10% of these deficits is really caused by the financial downturn. Most of it is structural. That is, it is the result of programs that have been in place for years... These programs just grow and grow...year after year...until they become unsupportable. And most of these programs are sold as Fab Finance...they transfer small, individual risks onto the balance sheet of the whole country. In fact, if you had to sum up the entire effect of Fab Finance - the whole body of ideas and theories of modern, anglo-saxon economics in the 20th century - you could say that they took small problems and turned them into big ones. Instead of running the risk that a few people will retire without sufficient funds, we now face the risk that the whole country will run out of money. Instead of taking the risk that some people will not be able to afford health care, we now run the risk that the whole nation will be bankrupted by public health care costs. Instead of allowing a few badly managed financial institutions to go under, the feds have put the entire credit of the United States of America at risk. And in Europe, we see the same thing. Instead of allowing tiny little Greece to go bust, the Europeans are spreading the risks out all over the Eurozone. I'm sure other speakers will talk about this, so I won't go into details. It's the most important economic event of our time. After a huge run up in debt in the private sector, now the public sector is having a go at it...and rolling it up into bigger and heavier balls. And what happens when the government spends too much and borrows too much? History tells us what happened in the past. Philosophy tells us what should happen. Governments go broke. Always have. Always will. But I'd like to share with you a headline from The Washington Post on Wednesday. The Post is the paper the politicians and bureaucrats read. So you can imagine how penetrating its insights are. Well, the headline that made me laugh was this: "Task force to tackle National Debt." Not many things are certain in this life. But I can guarantee you that the bipartisan task force will not get close enough to the National Debt to read the number on its jersey, let alone tackle it. The Great Depression convinced economists that they needed to be more activist. Now, our economy is responding to economic activism. And it will be destroyed by these modern ideas...and then, and only then, will new ideas arise. We're going to see a correction...a regression to the mean of a number of things...including the way people think. It is not normal to think you can spend your way out of debt. It's not normal to think you can consume capital and get richer. It's not normal to believe that central economic planning will make the world a better place. The Soviets proved that central planning doesn't work. We got to see that experiment. But instead of learning from it...we seem destined to repeat it. More tomorrow... Regards, Bill Bonner, for The Daily Reckoning

The Greatest Fight in Our History - This November

Please take the time to listen to Dennis Prager state the importance of this fall's elections.

A4 Driver

The Reason the Public Sector Will Not Balance Their Budgets

I really enjoy some of the financial/government debt articles written by Bill Bonner of Agora Financial.  Here is a recent article he wrote regarding the reasons that all levels of government can't balance their budgets.  And I am really tired of the local governments whining about having to cut police/fire/EMT/parks/libraries for local levies to pass while they don't make the hard decisions on all of the social feel good fluff.


A4 Driver

Governments CAN Go Broke

The countercyclical role of public sector finance

Bill Bonner Reckoning today from Baltimore, Maryland... Fabulous Fab Finance. Read more about it below... The idea is to push slimy packages of derivative debt onto people who don't know what they're doing. Serving lumps to chumps, in other words. Like a high-school cafeteria. Sometimes the victims are German banks. Sometimes they're hedge funds. And sometimes...yes...the victims are all of us. Here is how it works. The lowly householder can't pay his mortgage, so the mortgage company takes the loss. The mortgage company goes broke so the banks take a loss. The bank takes a loss so another bank, the one that bought its derivative debt bomb, goes broke. And then, the feds step in and take the debt over. And then they add trillions more - claiming to protect everyone from everything... ..the guy who hasn't saved for his retirement gets Social Security. The guy who hasn't got health insurance gets Medicaid or Medicare or some sort of freeby medical help. The bankers get bailed out. GM gets bailed out. Farmers get subsidies. Poor people get food stamps. Lobbyists get contracts.... ..and then the little government that is paying for all this can't go on...so a bigger government bails it out... ..and then, investors buy the big government's bonds...because they're safer...even though they're all in the same boat... ..and then the boat sinks! That's Fab Finance. More about it below.... In the meantime, here's a news item, from the Daily Press... Government workers out-earn private sector workers. That is part of the reason why the state, cities, counties and school boards are agonizing over how to bring their budgets in line with reduced tax revenues. Those budgets bear the pressure of salary scales for government workers that exceed those of the average private-sector worker/taxpayer. This month, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual look at compensation by region, by employer, by occupation, by just about any way you want to slice or dice it. Here's what it shows for Hampton Roads, as of July 2009: The average full-time state and local government worker in our region earned $23.46 per hour. The average private sector worker made $18.87. You might pass that off as an artifact of differences in the labor force of the two - that the private sector has, for example, more low- end service jobs. And there's an element of that. But the BLS handily provides numbers by occupation, so you can line up apples with apples. And when you look many of them, government workers have the advantage. Take secretaries and administrative assistants. In Hampton Roads, they make an average of $16.86 per hour in government offices, compared to $13.72 in the private sector. In our area, health workers get $29.63, on average, in government jobs and $23.80 in private industry. The one place government workers are at a disadvantage is in the top managerial ranks. But wages don't tell the whole story - about compensation, or about why governments are in financial distress. It's the benefits. The paid leave. The health insurance. And especially, the pensions. The BLS estimates that nationally, private industry pays $8.03 per hour in benefits while state and local governments pay $13.65 per hour. Add together pay and benefits on that national scale, and government work earns a 45 percent premium over the private sector. The private sector is de-leveraging...as near as we can tell. Private businesses cut their payrolls. They trimmed expenses. They protected their profit margins - generally. But the public sector figures it has a different role to play...a countercyclical role. While the private sector eases off, the public sector puts the pedal to the metal. That's been the story for the last year and a half. The government pays more. Hires more. And floats deeper in the water. Walter Wriston once commented that the "government can't go broke." But that just shows you why the banking sector is in such trouble; Wriston ran Citibank... The trouble with most people in economics and finance these days is that they study too much math and not enough history. If they read more history they'd know that governments go broke all the time. They'd probably get a hint about why governments go broke too - they pay too much; hire too many people; give away too much money on bread and circuses; and they get involved in too many costly foreign wars. What's new? Nothing really. But the fab finance is an innovation. Now, with the debt spread among so many unaware debtors...we can all go broke in a much bigger way.

I Wish the Reporting Was Complete

It's not like I am trying to defend BP, but this is one side of the story that the main stream media doesn't cover.  It is certainly in BP's best interests to get the undersea blowout plugged up.  Their CEO didn't help matters with his whining about getting home to see his wife.  This whole thing is unprecedented from a physical (physics) and depth perspective and the use of RPVs to do work that no one thought was their intended use.  You never hear about the relief wells that are being drilled as you will see in the video clip.  I know it's a pie in the sky dream, but it would be nice if we got some in-depth reporting of all that is being done to fix this problem.

This 13 minute technical review is back from May 24th so it is not the latest information but it shows that BP is doing a lot to try to fix this problem.  I tried to find an embed code but could not so you will have to use the link.

A4 Driver

 http://bp.concerts.com/gom/kentwells_update24052010.htm

"Alien Rule" - It Could Not have Been Labelled Any Better

This article is so spot on as to how I feel about Zero and his administration.  It does feel like a foreign occupying force has landed in our midst and they just don't "get it" or, more than likely, they do; it is right out of Saul Alinsky's "Rules For Radicals".  If it is, and it continues unabated, we will be living in an America that is far different from anything we or our parents ever dreamed about.


A4 Driver

April 29, 2010

A Stranger in Our Midst

By Robert Weissberg, Professor of Political Science - Emeritus at the University
of Illinois, Urbana


As the Obama administration enters its second year I, and undoubtedly millions of others, have struggled to develop a shorthand term that captures our emotional unease. Defining this discomfort is tricky. I reject nearly the entire Obama agenda, but the term "being opposed" lacks an emotional punch. Nor do terms like "worried" or "anxious" apply. I was more worried about America's future during the Johnson or Carter years, so it's not that dictionary, either. Nor, for that matter, is this about backroom odious deal-making and pork, which are endemic in American politics.
 
After auditioning countless political terms, I finally realized that the Obama administration and its congressional collaborators almost resemble a foreign occupying force, a coterie of politically and culturally non-indigenous leaders whose rule contravenes local values rooted in our national tradition. It is as if the United States has been occupied by a foreign power, and this transcends policy objections. It is not about Obama's birthplace. It is not about race, either; millions of white Americans have had black mayors and black governors, and this unease about out-of-synch values never surfaced.

The term I settled on is "alien rule" -- based on outsider values, regardless of policy benefits -- that generates agitation. This is what bloody anti-colonial strife was all about. No doubt, millions of Indians and Africans probably grasped that expelling the British guaranteed economic ruin and even worse governance, but at least the mess would be their mess. Just travel to Afghanistan and witness American military commanders' efforts to enlist tribal elders with promises of roads, clean water, dental clinics, and all else that America can freely provide. Many of these elders probably privately prefer abject poverty to foreign occupation since it would be their poverty, run by their people, according to their sensibilities.

This disquiet was a slow realization. Awareness began with Obama's odd  pre-presidency associations, decades of being oblivious to Rev. Wright's anti-American ranting, his enduring friendship with the terrorist guy-in-the-neighborhood Bill Ayers, and the Saul Alinsky-flavored anti-capitalist community activism. Further add a hazy personal background -- an Indonesian childhood, shifting official names, and a paperless-trail climb through elite educational institutions.

None of this disqualified Obama from the presidency; rather, this background just doesn't fit with the conventional political résumé. It is just the "outsider" quality that alarms. For all the yammering about George W. Bush's privileged background, his made-in-the-USA persona was absolutely indisputable. John McCain might be embarrassed about his Naval Academy class rank and iffy combat performance, but there was never any doubt of his authenticity. Countless conservatives despised Bill Clinton, but nobody ever, ever doubted his good-old-boy American bonafides.

The suspicion that Obama is an outsider, a figure who really doesn't "get" America, grew clearer from his initial appointments. What "native" would appoint Kevin Jennings, a militant gay activist, to oversee school safety? Or permit a Marxist rabble-rouser to be a "green jobs czar"? How about an Attorney General who began by accusing Americans of cowardice when it comes to discussing race? And who can forget Obama's weird defense of his pal Louis Henry Gates from "racist" Cambridge, Massachusetts cops? If the American Revolution had never occurred and the Queen had appointed Obama Royal Governor (after his distinguished service in Kenya), a trusted locally attuned aide would have first whispered in his ear, "Mr. Governor General, here in America, we do not automatically assume that the police were at fault," and the day would have been saved.

And then there's the "we are sorry, we'll never be arrogant again" rhetoric seemingly designed for a future President of the World election campaign. What made Obama's Cairo utterances so distressing was how they grated on American cultural sensibilities. And he just doesn't notice, perhaps akin to never hearing Rev. Wright anti-American diatribes. An American president does not pander to third-world audiences by lying about the Muslim contribution to America. Imagine Ronald Reagan, or any past American president, trying to win friends by apologizing. This appeal contravenes our national character and far exceeds a momentary embarrassment about garbled syntax or poor delivery. Then there's
Obama's bizarre, totally unnecessary deep bowing to foreign potentates. Americans look foreign leaders squarely in the eye and firmly shake hands; we don't bow.

But far worse is Obama's tone-deafness about American government. How can any ordinary American, even a traditional liberal, believe that jamming through unpopular, debt-expanding legislation that consumes one-sixth of our GDP, sometimes with sly side-payments and with a thin majority, will eventually be judged legitimate? This is third-world, maximum-leader-style politics. That the legislation was barely understood even by its defenders and vehemently championed by a representative of that typical American city, San Francisco, only exacerbates the strangeness. And now President Obama sides with illegal aliens over the State of Arizona, which seeks to enforce the federal immigration law to protect American citizens from marauding drug gangs and other miscreants streaming in across the Mexican border.

Reciprocal public disengagement from President Obama is strongly suggested by recent poll data on public trust in government. According to a recent Pew report, only 22% of those asked trust the government always or most of the time, among the lowest figures in half a century. And while pro-government support has been slipping for decades, the Obama presidency has sharply exacerbated this drop. To be sure, many factors (in particular the economic downturn) contribute to this decline, but remember that Obama was recently elected by an often wildly enthusiastic popular majority. The collapse of trust undoubtedly transcends policy quibbles or a sluggish economy -- it is far more consistent with a deeper alienation.

Perhaps the clearest evidence for this "foreigner in our midst" mentality is the name given our resistance -- tea parties, an image that instantly invokes the American struggle against George III, a clueless foreign ruler from central casting. This history-laden label was hardly predetermined, but it instantly stuck (as did the election of Sen. Scott Brown as "the shot heard around the world" and tea partiers dressing up in colonial-era costumes). Perhaps subconsciously, Obama does remind Americans of when the U.S. was really occupied by a foreign power. A Declaration of Independence passage may still resonate: "HE [George III] has erected a Multitude of new Offices [Czars], and sent hither Swarms of Officers [recently hired IRS agents] to harass our People, and eat out the Substance."