Staff members at twenty-four of the VA hospitals reported that “they felt threatened or coerced” into entering false data to protect their facilities’ fraudulent practices from being discovered.17
Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn had earlier called attention to the problems with our health-care system for veterans, but his attempts to bring the issue to the Senate floor for debate were blocked by Democrats. Coburn said Democrats share the responsibility for the VA scandal because they have refused to confront the issue.18
It’s clear to me that what is happening with the VA health-care situation is a smaller version of what we face with Obamacare. While the number of cases unattended to is in the hundreds of thousands in the VA, where Obamacare is concerned the number of people who face this type of treatment will run into the millions. I can only imagine how horrifying the results of a bureaucracy charged with helping that many patients will be.
The federal bureaucracy is committed to one thing: making sure they keep their own jobs, even though they don’t do them. The larger the bureaucracy, the more corrupt and incompetent it becomes. The losers are those poor people who must turn to the federal government for what they need.
Finally, I want to deal briefly with the incident at Cliven Bundy’s ranch in Nevada. I felt that had it resulted in weapons being fired, it might well have been the first battle of the coming civil war.
What did Nancy Pelosi say about the Bundy standoff?
Do you think she supported him as a disruptor?
What does Eric Holder say about free assembly?
Has the civil war already begun?
On Saturday, April 12, 2014, millions of Americans monitored live newscasts of a confrontation between armed troops representing the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and several hundred civilian supporters of Nevada rancher Bundy. Millions more followed the event on internet websites and through social media.
A federal force consisting of armored police SWAT team trucks, hundreds of armed BLM rangers and special agents, and dozens of armored SUVs out of which the BLM militia emerged carrying automatic weapons moved into the area where Cliven Bundy’s family had been grazing their cattle for 140 years. Helicopters monitoring the scene hovered overhead.
As BLM troops used helicopters to herd Cliven Bundy’s cattle from the land on which they were grazing into makeshift pens, more than two hundred angry Americans arrived at the scene, some on horseback, some on foot, many carrying American flags and signs in support of Cliven Bundy. They, too, were armed, and they were bent on stopping the federal storm troopers trying to take away the Bundy family’s livelihood. We were seeing images of federal troops with their rifles aimed at everyday Americans. We were seeing images that made what the federal government is doing to us concrete for Americans in a way that most of the scandals of this administration haven’t done.
Here are a federal judge’s words regarding Elwood Wayne Hage, another case in which a Nevada rancher was deprived of his right to graze cattle on federal land:
The government and the agents of the government in that locale, sometime in the ’70s and ’80s, entered into a conspiracy, a literal, intentional conspiracy, to deprive [ranchers] of not only their permit grazing rights,… but also to deprive them of their vested property rights under the takings clause, and I find that that’s a sufficient basis to hold that there is irreparable harm if I don’t… restrain the government from continuing in that conduct.19
Still don’t think that the Obama administration is leading this country into a civil war? I hope you are right. As a trained PhD scientist I can only study the evidence and give you my conclusions. Right now the prognosis is not good. We have an incompetent zealot taking the nation down the road of weakness and centralized governmental control of every aspect of our daily lives. Desiring to control us from inception to death, from womb to tomb. Monitoring our every word, controlling what we eat, drink, think, and speak. All in the name of “fairness.” Just as individuals snap when the pressure becomes too great, so, too, does a nation.
CHAPTER 2
The Long March
As I see it, the state of our union is in the most perilous position it’s been in since the 1860s. We are under assault from both inside and out as our government moves to consolidate its domestic power while at the same time weakening our defenses against the growing power of our global enemies. And all the while, the liberal government media complex watches the storm clouds gather with few keystrokes of reportage, outrage, or resistance.
I fear the worst.
Right now Americans are angrier and more divided than I’ve seen them since the 1960s. What fires this rage is that we’ve become a post-Constitutional society.
As you’ll read in the coming pages, the system has been turned upside down. What’s right is wrong. What’s good is bad. What’s subversive is patriotic. We now exist at the whim of lobbyists who control a government that is liable to do anything it wants to satisfy its lust for power.
Right now the nation is a tinderbox that can easily go up in flames, because we’re increasingly under the thumb of an administration that is destroying our two-hundred-year-old tradition of defending our borders, language, and culture and replacing it with a culture of statelessness and corruption.
Yes, there are Americans who stand up against this tyranny; good, god-fearing people who have had enough of seeing their civil rights trampled, their jobs vanish, and their incomes seized through taxation. I hope it’s not too late for recourse through democratic means.
But right now we’re in a place that mirrors the darkest days of our country’s history.
On February 10, 2007, some 146 years after Fort Sumter surrendered and the American Civil War began, Barack Obama announced his first presidential campaign in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois. In that speech, Obama declared that, like Lincoln, he was out to “free a people” and “transform a nation.” Without question, we’re living in a nation more divided than any since Lincoln’s presidency, and we’ve entered a time and place that may be as dangerous as it was during the Lincoln years. I worry, though, that as happened in Lincoln’s time, we’re moving not toward expanded freedom but toward civil war.
I fear the worst.
Let me be clear that while Barack Obama is the executive head of the current administration, I’m speaking in broader terms than simply about the president alone. I’m speaking of both Democratic and Republican senators and congressmen who are doing nothing to hold back a government that has, in my opinion, overreached its legal and Constitutional powers and brought us under its control. It is coming more and more to resemble a government based not on the rule of law but on the greed and hunger for power of a crony oligarchy. A civil war would enable this crony government to consolidate the power it has already granted itself through the broad use of executive orders, the power granted to Cabinet secretaries and other political appointees, and the unwillingness of our lawmakers to step in and put a halt to this takeover.
With our nation divided, the government could marshal all of those on its side—the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), street gangs, the National Guard, a military now purged of patriotic generals and without a command structure loyal to the Constitution—against those who would stand up to the oppression.
Something much like what we face today happened during Lincoln’s presidency. Lincoln wasn’t a saint. As great as he was, he committed crimes against the Constitution and against ordinary citizens.
In an 1862 proclamation, Lincoln declared that “Rebels and Insurgents” in the Southern states had created an “insurrection,” they were “subject to martial law,” and their right to a writ of habeas corpus was suspended.
Lincoln is estimated to have arrested and imprisoned some 20,000 civilians and detained them without trials. During the Civil War, Southern prisoners were held in internment camps under deplorable conditions. At Fort Delaware, more than 2,000 confederate soldiers died of scurvy and dysente
ry. Confederate prisoners in the Union camp at Rock Island were tortured by being hung by their thumbs.
Let us pray that Obama does not literally follow Abraham Lincoln’s example. Given his record of ignoring the Constitution and rewriting the law, anything is possible with our rogue president. Don’t think it can’t happen here. As we have seen with Lincoln, it already has.
I fear the worst, and you should, too.
Can the situation in our country actually turn into a civil war?
Of course it can. We’re seeing the signs of it everywhere.
It is no secret that Democrats are looking to take advantage of a divided Republican base to maintain their majority in the Senate. The most important thing we as a people must do in order to stop the ongoing assault against our freedoms by this administration is to unite behind Republican candidates. While for many conservatives this is a difficult thing to do, we must nonetheless oust Democrats from control over the U.S. Senate and hold on to our majority in the House. This means that we must turn out in large numbers for the coming elections, and we must elect Republicans.
If the status quo is allowed to remain, Democrats may keep their stranglehold on the Senate. As I see it, a Democrat-controlled Senate, as evidenced by recent history, guarantees a continued assault on the Constitution, congressional convention, and free speech.
Let me give you an example. In the wake of another maneuver by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—his suspension of the filibuster rule—Senate Democrats pushed through the appointment of four left-wing judges to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. With these appointments, Democrats paved the way for the court—the second most powerful judicial body in the United States—to approve curtailing the political speech of nonprofit groups that support conservative values and to dismiss legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act. They were able to consolidate the court against Obamacare despite the fact that millions of people may have already lost their health insurance coverage and millions more will likely be notified that they are due to lose theirs in the coming year. I’ll explain to you what Obamacare is really about in an upcoming chapter. For now, let me tell you that in the wake of the Harry Reid–led Senate Democrats’ majority ruling, Obamacare supporters are rubbing their hands.
Do you remember the economic crash of 2008? One of the key causes of that crash was the collapse of the housing bubble in the United States.
It’s happening again. Let me explain.
By mid-2013, a majority of the homes sold in the United States were being sold not to individuals but to large investors.1 Often, these investors buy hundred of houses, then rent them out while they wait for prices to increase. This causes a housing bubble based on rising home prices. The bubble will burst when large investors sell their holdings and take their profits. This, in turn, will plunge us back into recession.
Let me ask you this: When was Barack Obama elected? In case you’ve forgotten, it was immediately after the last housing bubble burst. In tough times people are compliant. Those seeking to expand their power take advantage of crises like the one we experienced in 2008. When the time is right, they grab power when those that need leadership are at their most vulnerable.
The same thing is happening with health-care insurance. To put it bluntly, Obamacare is unsustainable. Once the health-care bubble bursts, and it will very soon, it’s not out of the question that an executive order will be issued that puts a majority of physicians and hospitals under the direct control of the federal government.
Within the next few years, health care will very likely become a haves-versus-the-have-nots industry. Those who can afford it will bypass insurance and pay for their medical treatment directly to physicians who maintain private practices and to the best hospitals, which are excluded from Obamacare. The best medical research and treatment hospitals in the United States—hospitals like the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center—will very likely become oases for the überrich, the only people who will be able to afford the best medical care.
The remaining 90 percent of Americans may be consigned to wait in interminable lines to receive their health-care services from the rapidly diminishing number of physicians and hospitals still available to provide medical treatment for them.
Do you think Americans will stand still for that?
Meanwhile, the fragile economy—don’t be fooled, it’s not improving—will be driven to the brink of collapse by the bursting of the housing bubble, skyrocketing health-care costs, and several other factors.
Other nations will likely refuse to buy the U.S. Treasury bonds on which we’ve been financing our soaring debt. The U.S. dollar has long been the currency on which the world’s economy is built. It is becoming increasingly unstable, and the consequences will not be good for us. The dollar, which has been the global reserve currency, will likely continue to lose value.
Prior to 2014, virtually all international sales of oil were settled in U.S. petrodollars. Now China, one of the largest importers of oil, has begun settling its foreign oil purchases in yuan, its own currency.2 At the same time, the other so-called BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa—are also moving away from the petrodollar, settling oil trades in their own currencies.3
For the United States, which imports more foreign goods than anyone else in the world, an unstable dollar means that Americans spend more to import less. We will be effectively importing inflation with every purchase of foreign goods. The government tries to hide this deficiency with three-card-monte statistics. Government inflation charts no longer include such items as food and gasoline and wage stagnation in their calculations. While they report inflation at less than 2 percent, the real number is near 10 percent and rising.4 But the proof is in the dwindling bank accounts of regular Americans.
As the economy is challenged, so are our freedoms.
The National Security Agency (NSA) will almost certainly continue what I see as its hostile takeover of Americans’ formerly private information. The technology and storage capacity of the NSA is nearly limitless. A massive amount of information about Americans’ everyday activities is captured and stored in the million-square-foot federal data center in Bluffdale, Utah, in the form of “metadata.”5
What worries me most, though, is not that the NSA is monitoring the communications of suspected terrorists in order to prevent them from staging another attack on this country. I’m much more worried about the fact that, as the Washington Post reported, based on information about more than 150,000 intercepted communications, nearly half of these exchanges contained only private information, including personal photographs, about the American citizens who shared them. Despite the fact that they were deemed to be “useless” by intelligence analysts, they were retained and stored by the NSA.6
In addition to collecting, storing, and distributing our medical and financial records as part of the Affordable Care Act, the Internal Revenue Service has become the arbiter of political speech in the United States. Tax-exempt groups like the Tea Party, whose activities the IRS has been curtailing for years, are particularly vulnerable to the practices by this federal agency.7 If what has already begun is allowed to continue, political speech that goes against the ruling powers may be censored completely.
Will Americans go quietly as they see their freedoms being lost on every front?
Our position as a world power has become greatly diminished. Our military culture has been strongly influenced, even corrupted, by changing values adopted by those who determine the rules under which our military operates. These changes are eviscerating our military power and readiness. Left unchecked, they threaten to destroy our armed forces.
High-ranking officers who run afoul of this increasingly subversive military culture are often dismissed summarily on the weakest of charges. Our military left growing chaos behind it following its exit from the Middle East. Russian despot Vladimir Putin takes advantage of the current administration’s growing retreat from the world sta
ge to expand his power into Eastern Europe. While he does that, our own military budget cuts are made at the expense of the technology our soldiers need in order to do their job effectively.
Our influence in the increasingly dangerous Middle East has all but vanished. In the wake of this, Middle East peace becomes more and more unrealistic. The weakness of our military influence in the Middle and Far East puts us in the most vulnerable position since Pearl Harbor was attacked.
But as bad as it is for us abroad, the economic conditions and division at home are even more perilous. With the U.S. job market remaining soft and our money continuing to lose purchasing power, can it be long before Americans begin public demonstrations like the ones we see in European cities?
The United States may well be in the midst of a military, economic, and cultural collapse that is turning us into a country in danger of catastrophic failure and leading to the nightmarish scenario of a civil war.
With our international power and influence weakened dramatically, Republican and Democratic plutocrats may seize control of the political process while the will of the people goes unheeded. Conservative voices are increasingly being drowned out.
Several months ago I watched the opening ceremony of an Olympics held in a country that has been the archenemy of the United States for most of the past seventy years. The Sochi games swelled with Russian nationalism and pride. The rich history of the former Soviet Union was put on dazzling display and drew the delight and envy of the rest of the world.
At the same time, it brought tears of sadness from Americans at the lack of patriotism and nationalism here. We were once a country that was proud to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. We were a shining example of right and power. It was we—America, not Russia—who were the envy of the world. This book is ultimately about how we resurrect ourselves as a nation.
Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth Page 2
