Thus did the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative rhapsodize about the potential of our new trade treaty with South Korea.

And how has it worked out for Uncle Sam?

Well, courtesy of Martin Crutsinger of The Associated Press, the trade figures are in for April, the first full month under the trade deal with South Korea.

And, surprise! The U.S. trade deficit with Korea tripled in one month. Imports from South Korea jumped 15 percent to $5.5 billion in April, while U.S. exports to South Korea fell 12 percent to $3.7 billion. Suddenly, the U.S. trade deficit with Seoul surged to an annual rate of $22 billion.

Shades of NAFTA. When it passed in 1993, we had a $1.6 billion trade surplus with Mexico. By 2010, our trade deficit with Mexico had reached $61.6 billion.

There is other news of interest in those trade figures for those who chronicle the industrial decline of the United States.

In 2011, America ran the largest trade deficit ever with a single nation, $295.4 billion, with China. But this year, the U.S. trade deficit with China is running 12 percent ahead of 2011.

And the U.S. trade deficit with the world is now back up over $600 billion a year.

What do these mammoth and mounting deficits mean?

A deepening dependence on foreign nations for the necessities of our national life. A steady erosion of our manufacturing base. A continued stagnation in the real wages of the middle class. And an unending redistribution of America's wealth to foreign lands.

It is no coincidence that the real wages of U.S. workers ceased to rise in the mid-1970s, just as a century of U.S. trade surpluses was coming to an end.

In 1975, we began three decades of trade deficits that grew until, in the Bush II years, they reached 8 percent of the entire economy. These deficits helped to precipitate the Great Recession and helped to prevent our rescue from it.

For just as a trade surplus adds to the gross domestic product of a nation, a trade deficit subtracts from it, substituting foreign goods for U.S.-made goods.

If one would, in a sitting of a single hour, understand where and why America converted from the economic patriotism of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Cal Coolidge to the free-trade ideology of academics and ideologues, none of whom ever built a great nation, let me commend a splendid pamphlet from The Conservative Caucus.

"The Conservative Case Against Free Trade," by Ian Fletcher and William Shearer, is a brisk walk through the trade and tariff history of the republic. It is a short story of national decline, of how a nation that converted itself in its first century from 13 agricultural colonies into the greatest industrial power the world had ever seen began to kick it all away in the third century of its existence.

It is a chronicle of the rise and fall of the United States as a sovereign and self-sufficient republic.

The knock on economic nationalists is that they really do not believe in trade.

This is nonsense. Like libertarians, economic patriots believe in untrammeled free trade among the states of the Union.

They believe in the 14th Amendment's equal protection of the law. U.S. wage-and-hour laws, civil rights laws and environmental laws should apply equally to factories from New York to New Mexico and from Alabama to Arizona. If states wish to adopt their own right-to-work laws or abolish corporate income taxes, that is free and fair competition.

Global free trade is an altogether different matter.

If you move your factory to Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, China or Bangladesh, the 14th Amendment no longer applies.

Global free trade means U.S. workers compete with Asian and Latin American workers whose wages are a fraction of our own and whose benefits may be nonexistent. Global free trade means U.S factories that relocate to Indonesia or India need not observe U.S. laws on health, safety, pollution or paying a minimum wage.

Global free trade means that companies that move factories outside the United States can send their products back to the United States free of charge and undercut businessmen who retain their American workers and live within American laws.

Free trade makes suckers and fools out of patriots.

Anticipating the Davos crowd, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."

Instead of a trade policy crafted for the benefit of multinationalist corporations, we need a new trade policy that puts America and Americans first.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

Sam Gompers, the legendary father of American labor, wrote the governor that the Boston police had been denied their rights.

Coolidge's terse reply put him in our history books:

Your assertion that the Commissioner was wrong cannot justify the wrong of leaving the city unguarded. ... There is no right to strike against the public safety by anyone, anywhere, any time.

Ronald Reagan's firing of the striking air traffic controllers, whose union had been among the few to endorse him, marked him as a leader willing to act against a powerful union if the public interest commands it.

Gov. Scott Walker is now in that tradition. He has just routed a recall campaign that began with state senators disgracefully fleeing to Illinois rather than provide a quorum and mobs occupying his capitol.

Walter's victory is a fire bell in the night for the public-sector unions. It reflects a rising realization among all Western peoples that to continue accommodating the demands of government unions is to risk our survival as free and prosperous nations.

The Badger State rout of Big Labor was total.

The public-employee unions first capitulated to the governor's demand that they contribute more to their pensions and health care benefits. But they drew the line at Walker's determination to curtail collective bargaining and to cease deducting union dues from the paychecks of state workers.

Collect your dues yourself, the governor was telling the unions.

With their union dues no longer taken out of their paychecks, tens of thousands of Wisconsin public employees refused to pony up those dues and quit their union, instead. What does this tell us?

Many union members do not believe they get their money's worth from unions that claim to represent them, and would prefer to get out of the union and keep the dues money themselves.

This desertion by their members represents a massive vote of no confidence in unions like the America Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of Teachers. AFSCME in Wisconsin lost 34,000 of its 62,000 members last year alone.

From the Wisconsin experience, if right-to-work laws were enacted in every state, giving employees freedom to join or leave a union, public-employee unions would be abandoned, reduced to shadows of what they are today. What does it say about a union if its members would prefer not to belong, if they were free to leave?

The curtailment of collective bargaining is the issue on which Walker appeared to be on the weakest ground, as school kids are taught that collective bargaining is a sacrosanct right.

Yet here, too, the governor has a compelling argument.

When union leaders put piles of cash into political campaigns, and union bosses then sit down to bargain with the people they have just put into office, who represents the public?

Is there not an inherent conflict of interest when unions literally purchase with campaign contributions the election of officials with whom they are to negotiate the new contracts for their members?

There are other reasons public-employee unions are losing public support. The pay and benefits of federal employees are twice that of the average private-sector worker, while the pay and benefits of state employees are half again as high. And government workers enjoy a job security few private-sector workers ever know.

Unionized government workers are seen by almost no one as victims. Yet their numbers are huge.

Where there were twice as many Americans working in manufacturing as in government in 1960, today the reverse is true. We have 22 million workers in government and 11 million in manufacturing.

This is an immense and costly army for taxpayers to sustain.

Even Democrats, though they howl that we must milk the rich more, are starting to concede that the government sector, now at a peacetime record 37 percent of the gross domestic product, must be pared back.

The salad days of the government employee are coming to an end, as they have already in Greece, Italy and Spain.

As Europe went farther down that "road to socialism" than did we, the pain there will be greater. But it is coming here, too.

Already, states and cities have begun cutting their labor force. And the states that were most indulgent in providing pay and benefits their taxpayers could not afford are the states being hit hardest, like Barack Obama's Illinois and Jerry Brown's California.

The anger and accusations of union leaders, directed at Gov. Walker, testify to their shocked awareness of the new political realities.

And Obama's conspicuous absence from the battlefield—he sent a tweet and did a flyover—testifies to his recognition that while government unions may be his loyal political allies, they are also an albatross hanging around his neck this November.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

So should they be killed? The thought is tempting and rather appealing, the imagination runs pleasingly wild. On reflection it has to be rejected. Provided we accept the morally necessary assumption that for all their sulphurically scented traits, the Bankers are “humans,” we cannot escape the Raskolnikov dilemma.

The Russians are the last civilized nation to take literature as seriously as life, and they will be the last to subject that heritage to the deconstructivist butchery of effeminate idiots with minor-college PhDs. This is to their credit because Raskolnikov should be seen as a living person living a real life in New York, or London, or the Midwest today. This real-life person—a teacher, a corporate bureaucrat, a construction engineer, a retired policeman, or a housewife…—should be forgiven for wishing Bankers dead. But their all too understandable sentiment is essentially the same as that of the Red Commissars of 1917 and their heirs everywhere As Dostoyevsky understood decades before Lenin, it is dangerous; understandable; but not justified.

The Bankers should be discredited, tarred, and feathered, stripped of every last cent of their ill-gotten gains, and put to work on a Californian orange farm—absolutely!—but they should not be killed.

A bit of history. I was 15 when I visited St. Petersburg—then still “Leningrad”—with a Belgrade high school tour. My purpose was to go in quest of Dostoevsky, my favorite writer, whom I had just started discovering at that time. He wrote Crime and Punishment on the banks of the Neva—one of the best structured, intricately multi-layered novels of all time. (I even named my son Theodore in Fyodor Mikhailovich's honor.)

It was early July and the White Nights of the North were at their whitest, and the days were sunny. Yet the essential gloomy essence of the place—thickly felt in the courtyard of the building the author inhabited when writing his masterpiece, and in which his tortured hero Raskolnikov lived—could not be concealed. Behind the layers of Soviet decrepitude, one could sense the splendor of Peter the Great’s design. Such splendor makes up not for joyful livability. The city was essentially unchanged since the 1860s (minus some 1941-44 German-inflicted damage, not too visible) and its misty distances looked flat and indistinct against the pale backdrop of the Northern sky behind and the rising mist of its many waterways and canals in front. St. Petersburg is the most European city in Russia and the most inherently perverted for being so. Dostoevsky's novel embodies the worst aspects of both cultures that offer two poles of one civilization.

That essential gloom of the place (which I have not visited since but I don't believe has changed) provided a perfect setting for the novel which is the essential key to understanding the dilemma of our postmodern times. Raskolnikov rails against the social injustice without being a Marxist (not even knowing that the author of Das Kapital exists), adores Napoleon as the 19th century model of superhuman greatness but does not seek l'Empereur's glory for himself. His obsessive quest for "justice" becomes tangibly personified in the old usurer whom he finally kills—premeditatedly murders her—as an act of ontological retribution.

“I wanted to kill without casuistry, to kill for my own sake," Dostoevsky has him say reflecting obviously his own passions, "it was not money I needed but something else…I wanted to know, and to know quickly, whether I was a worm like everyone else, or a man. Shall I be able to transgress or shall I not? Shall I dare to stoop down and take, or not? Am I a trembling creature, or have I the right?”

But Raskolnikov soon discovers he is not a superman capable of enacting his own moral laws, and the lesson has been re-learnt at a great cost by Dostoyevsky’s heirs in the horrible century that followed his death. On the other hand, Raskolnikov is not satisfied with the lower-category claim that because the victim was a horrible, laecherous hag (the usurer was ugly, unlike many of her well-groomed Wall Street heirs), her death was for the good of all. The key issue is that Raskolnikov is utterly unable to live with what he has done; he is going neurotic verging on insane; and in the fullness of time, he willingly makes a full confession to a police inspector who knows his soul. Porfiry Petrovich is not playing games—but merely leading him along the way to inner release that comes with confession.

This dilemma—can we be Gods?—is at the novel’s heart, and at the heart of the crisis of our civilization. And that is why we should let the bankers live, which is not to say we should try to destroy them and all they stand for.

Unlike the Communist mass murderers of the past century, Raskolnikov sees clearly his tragic predicament through the prism of a distinctly Christian hate of cunning commerce and ruthless profitmaking. Being prepared to use violence against those who destroy the meek and the pure of spirit for Mammon's sake, but NOT being a secular revolutionary—he IS what the Rulers of the World fear the most.

But in the end, with a Russian twist that is essentially pan-Christian, he repents and realizes that "Thou shalt not kill!" takes precedence. And the end of the story is the new beginning, as he serves his sentence in Siberia, accompanied by his long-suffering Sonia: “Here begins a new story, the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his rebirth, of his gradual transition from one world to another, and of the revelation to him of a new, hitherto quite unknown reality.”

This is a blueprint for our own rebirth and renewal in the dark times ahead. And screw the bankers.

While the unemployment rate had fallen from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, 342,000 workers had stopped looking for work. They had just dropped out of the labor market.

Only 63.6 percent of the U.S. working age population is now in the labor force, the lowest level since December 1981.

During the Reagan, Bush I and Clinton years, participation in the labor force rose steadily to a record 67 percent. The plunge since has been almost uninterrupted.

Here is a major cause of the economic malaise of the 21st century, a condition over which a president has little control. A shrinking share of our population is carrying an ever-expanding army of dependents.

If this were a result of American women going home to have kids, that would be, as it was after World War II, a manifestation of national vigor and health.

But that is not the case here.

The number of Americans of working age not in the labor force grew in April from 87,897,000 to 88,419,000—by an astonishing 522,000. This is an immense army for the rest of society to carry.

Why are Americans dropping out?

Some have given up looking for jobs in towns they grew up in, because the jobs are gone and not coming back, and they don't want to leave. Some are rejecting the low-wage unskilled work being offered, because the alternative—unemployment checks and federal and state welfare—is not all that torturous.

With some, the work incentive was never implanted. With others, the option of moving back in with the parents is not all that terrible.

America, it seems, is becoming less like the country we grew up in, in its attitudes about work and idleness, and more like Europe.

Whatever its causes, this social and economic torpor that seems beyond the capacity of presidents to correct or cure is a dark cloud over the hopes of Barack Obama for a second term.

And yet another ominous cloud, no longer on the far horizon, is now directly above: the impending departure from the labor force of 70 million baby boomers in the next two decades.

According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, from Jan. 1, 1930, to Dec. 31, 1935, there were 13 million births in the U.S. From January 1940 through December 1945, there were 16 million.

This was the Silent Generation, born in Depression and war. It never produced a president, and never will, unless Ron Paul catches fire pretty quickly. The Greatest Generation gave us six presidents, starting with JFK and ending with Bush I. Our three most recent presidents—Bill Clinton, Bush II, Barack Obama—are all baby boomers

And here we come to the heart of our next economic crisis.

If one adds up all the children born between Jan. 1, 1946 and Jan. 1, 1965, the era of the great American baby boom, the total comes to 77 million babies born in the United States.

Why is this so significant now?

Because this year, 2012, the first wave of baby boomers, all those born in 1946, like Clinton and George W. Bush, will reach 66, and eligibility for full Social Security and Medicare benefits. The boomers, en masse, will start moving off payrolls onto pension rolls.

Let us assume the 77 million boomers are down to 72 million. This means that over the next 20 years, boomers will be retiring and reaching eligibility for Social Security and Medicare at a rate of 3.6 million a year, or 300,000 a month, or 10,000 every day.

Three hundred thousand a month leaving the labor force may help to explain its shrinkage. And as the boomers are the best-paid, best-educated generation we produced, the loss of their collective skills, abilities and tax contributions will be as heavy a blow to the nation as the funding of their Medicare and Social Security will be a burden to the taxpayers they leave behind in the labor force.

Since Roe v. Wade, abortions have carried off 53 million of the generations that were to replace the boomers. While those 53 million lost have been partially replaced by 40 million immigrants, legal and illegal, our recent immigrants have not exhibited the same income- or tax-producing capacity as boomers.

In 1965, LBJ announced his plan to convert our ordinary society into a Great Society. Since then, trillions have been spent.

The fruits of that immense investment? The illegitimacy rate, dropout rate, crime rate and incarceration rate have set new records, as the test scores of high school students have plummeted to new lows.

Our labor force is shrinking, the number of dependent U.S. adults is growing, our social programs are failing, and our best educated and most productive generation is retiring.

To borrow from Merle Haggard, "Are the good times really over for good?"

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

So Rick Perry colorfully characterized the private equity firm Bain Capital, once run by Mitt Romney.

How did Bain prosper? Says Perry:

"These companies ... come in and loot the people's jobs, loot their pensions (and) loot their ability to take care of their families."

Behind this depiction is a 28-minute documentary, King of Bain, being aired in South Carolina by a super political action committee that supports Newt Gingrich and is financed by Vegas-Macau casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

The truth, however, turns out to be less colorful, as The Washington Post has awarded the documentary four Pinocchios for "manipulative interviews" and a "highly misleading portrayal of Romney's years at Bain Capital."

Seems that two of the companies Bain allegedly looted were not acquired until after Mitt left the firm, and the closure of a third plant in Gaffney, S.C., was no communal disaster.

No one in Gaffney, writes The New York Times, seems to recall the company, and the local paper did not even report its demise.

King of Bain is a hit piece, a malicious libel full of so many errors and lies that even Newt said it must be corrected or pulled down.

Yet if Romney is nominated, we will see this avenue of attack pursued by the Democrats. For populist assaults on capitalists and capitalism, dating back to William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech to the 1896 Democratic National Convention, have a long and venerable history.

Moreover, the hysteria of Beltway Republicans and their Chamber of Commerce allies over the Newt-Perry attacks on Mitt "the predator" and Mitt "the vulture capitalist" testifies to the power of the narrative and Republicans' fear of it. And they would do well to be fearful.

To many Americans, the period from the Civil War to World War I, when U.S. production grew from half of what Britain produced to twice what Britain produced, was a legendary era of growth and prosperity.

To others, however, this was the Gilded Age of Jim Fisk and James Gould, of robber barons and the Pullman strike, of the Haymarket Massacre and the Homestead strike at Carnegie Steel, where armed Pinkertons came up the river in barges to break the strike, only to be shot, disarmed and beaten by strikers and their families.

In 1904, Ida Tarbell wrote The History of the Standard Oil Company, painting oil magnate John D. Rockefeller as a capitalist without conscience, a "money-mad ... hypocrite." "Our national life is on every side distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner, for the kind of influence he exercises."

In 1906, Upton Sinclair penned The Jungle, a novel depicting the horrors of the stockyards and meat-packing plants of Chicago.

Teddy Roosevelt said of these reformers, "The men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck."

Yet T.R. himself took up the role of trustbuster. When J.P. Morgan wrote to him to protest Justice Department moves against one of his trusts—"Just send your man to my man and we can fix it up"—T.R.'s man at Justice retorted, "We don't want to fix it up; we want to stop it."

Teddy Roosevelt savaged the "malefactors of great wealth," and his cousin Franklin would echo him on taking office, denouncing "the money changers ... in the temple of our civilization."

They hate me, exulted FDR, "and I welcome their hatred!" He went on to crush and almost wipe out the Republican Party in 1936.

At the end of the Reagan era, which the left had decried, Barbarians at the Gate was published, portraying the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts as a manifestation of colossal greed.

Michael Lewis—author of Liar's Poker, about the fall of Salomon Brothers, and The Big Short—has built a successful career describing the amorality at the apex of corporate America.

Today, President Barack Obama, with his Osawatomie, Kan., attack on "breathtaking greed," channeling T.R., seeks to insert himself in that populist tradition.

Undeniably, Americans cherish their economic freedom and respect the men who helped make America great, inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison and industrialists such as Henry Ford.

But they do not revere the men who make millions and billions at the big casinos of capitalism. They do not admire a George Soros for winning his billion-dollar bet shorting the British pound.

They believe that a man's professional, as well as private, life should be guided by a conscience. And because they recoil from the teachings of Karl Marx does not mean they embrace the values of Ayn Rand.

Let-the-devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism, economic Darwinism, is neither conservatism nor Americanism.

Should Mitt Romney be nominated, he will need to make a national address defending his career at Bain Capital with the same conviction and passion with which he defended his faith in the campaign of 2008.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

Deadlock. There will be no big jobs-for-taxes deal. The can will be kicked down the road into the next administration.

A second truth is emerging. When the cutting comes, as it shall, the Pentagon will be first to ascend the scaffold.

Why so? Consider.

The Republican House cannot agree to tax increases without risking retribution from the base and repudiation by its presidential candidates. All have pledged to oppose even a dollar in tax hikes for 10 dollars in spending cuts.

For his part, Obama has refused to lay out any significant cuts in the big Democratic entitlement programs of Social Security and Medicare.

As for the hundreds of billions in Great Society spending for Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, earned income tax credits, aid to education, Pell grants and housing subsidies, neither Harry Reid's Senate nor Obama, in trouble with his African-American base, will permit significant cuts.

That leaves two large items of a budget approaching $4 trillion: interest on the debt, which must be paid, and national defense.

Pentagon chief Leon Panetta can see the writing on the wall.

Defense is already scheduled for $350 billion in cuts over the decade. If the super-committee fails to come up with $1.2 trillion in specified new cuts, an automatic slicer chops another $600 billion from defense.

House Armed Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon has issued an analysis of what that would mean: a U.S. Army and Marine Corps reduction of 150,000 troops, retirement of two carrier battle groups, loss of one-third of Air Force fighter planes and a "hollow force" unable to meet America's commitments.

Also on the chopping block would be the Navy and Marine Corps versions of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. If the super-committee trigger has to be pulled, says Panetta, "we'd be shooting ourselves in the head."

That half defense-half domestic formula for automatic budget cuts was programmed into the slicer to force Republicans to put tax hikes on the table. They will refuse. For tax hikes would do more damage to the party than the slicing would the Pentagon.

Thus America approaches her moment of truth.

Thanks to the irresponsibility of both parties, of the Bush as well as Obama administrations, we are facing unavoidable and painful choices.

We are going to have to reduce the benefits and raise the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare. Cut and cap Great Society programs. Downsize the military, close bases and transfer to allies responsibility for their own defense. Or we are going to have to raise taxes—and not just on millionaires and billionaires, but Middle America.

And if our leaders cannot impose these sacrifices, the markets will, as we see in Europe, where the day of reckoning is at hand. Ours is next.

But if defense cuts are unavoidable, where should they come? What should our future defense posture be? Which principles should apply?

Clearly, the first principle should be that the United States must retain a sufficiency, indeed, a surplus of power to defend all of its vital interests and vital allies, though the defense of those allies must be first and foremost their own responsibility. They have to replace U.S. troops as first responders.

During the Cold War, America was committed to go to war on behalf of a dozen NATO nations from Norway to Turkey. Eastern Europe under Moscow's boot was not considered vital.

Thus we resisted the Berlin Blockade, but peacefully. We did nothing to rescue the Hungarian revolution in 1956, or the Prague Spring in 1968, or the Polish Solidarity movement in 1981, when all three were crushed.

Now that the Red Army has gone home, Eastern Europe is free, and the Soviet Union no longer exists, what is the argument for maintaining U.S. Air Force, Army and naval bases and thousands of U.S. troops in Europe?

Close the bases, and bring the troops home.

The same with South Korea and Japan. Now that Mao is dead and gone and China is capitalist, Seoul and Tokyo trade more with Beijing than they do with us.

South Korea has 40 times the economy and twice the population of North Korea. Japan's economy is almost as large as China's. Why cannot these two powerful and prosperous nations provide the troops, planes, ships and missiles to defend themselves? We can sell them whatever they need.

Why is their defense still our responsibility?

In the Persian Gulf we have a strategic interest: oil. But the oil-rich nations of the region have an even greater interest in selling their oil than we do in buying it. For, without oil sales, the Gulf has little the world needs or wants.

Let the world look out for itself for a while. Time to start looking out for America and Americans first. For if we don't, who will?

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

The article also notes one of the causes: "Corporations have cut costs by moving manufacturing jobs, routine computer programming, and even simple legal work out of the country." But the article, like all the presidential candidates, treats this massive outsourcing as a force of nature, akin to the tides, about which nothing can be done. Actually, something can be done about outsourcing, and was done for most of American history. That something was the tariff. And we are not going to see sustained improvement in jobs and wages until we begin to remember what earlier generations of Americans knew about protecting American industry and American jobs.

S&P, we are reminded, was giving A ratings to banks like Lehman Brothers, whose books were stuffed with suspect subprime paper, right up to the day Lehman Brothers fell over dead.

Moreover, S&P made a $2 trillion error in its assessment of U.S. debt and used political criteria in making its downgrade.

All of which may be true. But none of which is relevant.

This downgrade is deeply deserved. For no one really believes the United States is going to pay its creditors back the $14 trillion it owes them, or the $21 trillion it will owe them at decade's end, with dollars of the same value as those that the United States is borrowing today.

In the last year alone, the U.S. dollar has lost 30 percent of its value against the Swiss franc.

A Swiss citizen who exchanged francs for $100,000 in dollars in June 2010 to buy one-year T-bills, then cashed those T-bills in this June, would have gotten back $100,000 in U.S. dollars. But those dollars would now be worth 30 percent less in Swiss francs.

On Meet the Press, Alan Greenspan insisted that the United States is not going to default. Why not? Because our debt is denominated in dollars, and we can print dollars to pay off our creditors. Which is pretty much what Chairman Ben Bernanke and the Fed have been doing.

With the dollar down 5 to 10 percent this year alone against the world's more respected currencies, we are engaged in what the Romans called coin-clipping—official stealing from citizens and foreigners.

Why are the Chinese so upset?

Because they are sitting on more than $1 trillion in U.S. bonds and Treasury bills bought with dollars we paid them for Chinese-made goods, while the purchasing power of the dollars that those bonds and T-bills represent withers away every week.

"I believe this is, without question, the 'Tea Party downgrade,'" says Sen. John Kerry.

How so? Because the Tea Party blocked the big deal President Obama sought to cut with House Speaker John Boehner to resolve the deficit-debt crisis.

The president, we are told, was prepared to accept $3 trillion in reduced future spending for entitlements like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but the Tea Party caucus refused to let Boehner agree even to $1 trillion in "revenue enhancement."

But here, a question arises: If the president believes entitlement reform is essential to get America's deficit-debt crisis under control, why does he need Tea Party cover to do his duty?

He doesn't. Tea Party intransigence on taxes is not the reason for Obama's failure to cut spending. It is his excuse.

Indeed, if Obama announced tomorrow that he was going to cut future spending on entitlements by $3 trillion to restore our AAA credit rating, he would have the full support of the Tea Party.

His opposition would come from Kerry's colleagues in the Senate and Nancy Pelosi's in the House.

To see how absurd it is to blame Tea Party Republicans for the downgrading of America's debt, imagine this scenario: Rep. Ron Paul is speaker of the House, Sen. Rand Paul is majority leader, and Rep. Paul Ryan is president of the United States.

Does anyone doubt this trio would restore the U.S credit rating in a New York minute? Every sacred cow in the federal pasture, from food stamps to foreign aid, would be hanging in the meat locker.

The American people have come to like the president, but a majority is coming to believe he is simply not the decisive president we need to lead us out of the morass in which he found the country and from which he has failed to extricate us.

"He made it worse!" is shaping up as the GOP slogan for 2012.

If Obama wishes to restore the AAA rating of his country, he might consider two separate and bold steps, both consistent with his professed beliefs.

First, tell the Republicans that if they will not agree to revenue enhancement, he will nonetheless do his duty and pare back spending in the entitlement programs. He would get instant GOP support.

Following this, he could go to the Republicans and tell them that if they agree to eliminate the clutter in the tax code—exemptions, loopholes, deductions—he will agree to cut tax rates for individuals and corporations alike, to make America more competitive.

Again, he would have the support of Republicans and the Tea Party. It might even advance his re-election prospects, if he could get renominated by his own party, which would rebel at both reforms because they would mean a suspension of the politics of tax and spend.

As for the S&P downgrade, again, the only surprise is it didn't come sooner.

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

Because of Tea Party intransigence and threats against their own leader John Boehner, the speaker had to reject Obama's "grand bargain," the "big deal" of $3 trillion in budget cuts for $1 trillion in "revenue enhancement."

These crazed ideologues, the Tea Partiers, we are told by the talking heads, just do not understand that governing is about compromise.

And that is the mindset of a city that relishes nothing more than those "Kumbaya" moments when Democrats and Republicans break ranks and appear grinning together at a joint press conference to announce a "big deal" to do what is best for America.

Decade after decade, the play is re-enacted.

But the Tea Party folks were elected to close the play. As Ronald Reagan said, "We were sent here to drain the swamp, not to get along with the alligators."

And what have the big deals done for America?

Reagan was persuaded to sign on to a bipartisan big deal to cut spending three dollars for every dollar he accepted in new taxes. And the Gipper forever believed he had been lied to, as he got three dollars in tax hikes for every dollar in spending cuts.

Obama's offer to Boehner is the same one Reagan signed on to.

George H.W. Bush agreed to break his pledge of "no new taxes," and raised the top rate from Reagan's 28 percent to 35 percent.

How did that work out?

A recession ensued that probably cost Bush his presidency.

The biggest of big deals came when the GOP establishment arrived in Bill Clinton's East Room to endorse NAFTA, GATT and a World Trade Organization that stripped America of her right to make and enforce her own trade laws.

Economic patriots fought the surrender of sovereignty and were dismissed as protectionists.

How did NAFTA, GATT and the WTO work out?

Since 1992, the United States has run a total of $7 trillion in trade deficits. Six million manufacturing jobs disappeared in the last decade, along with 50,000 factories. This year's trade deficit just returned to an annual rate of $600 billion.

China is now the world's leading manufacturing power. And what are Republicans doing? Demanding new free-trade deals with Panama, Colombia and South Korea.

Anyone heard any Republican candidate advance a credible plan to reindustrialize America and leave China in the dust?

Anyone heard a Republican candidate call for America to give the WTO six months' notice and get out, so we can go about rebuilding our country rather than babbling on about some New World Order? The biggest dealmaker of them all was George W. Bush.

Before he launched the war on Iraq, he got Democratic Sens. Tom Daschle, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards and Chris Dodd to give him a blank check. As the Republican Establishment signed on to Clinton's trade deals, the Democratic Establishment signed on to Bush's war.

Dissenters were denounced, once again, as isolationists.

How did that big deal turn out?

It cost us 4,400 dead, 35,000 wounded and $1 trillion, with 100,000 Iraqi dead and half a million widows and orphans. Four million Iraqis have been uprooted from their homes, half fleeing to foreign lands. Half of these exiles are Christians whose communities, there since the time of Christ, are dying, as Islamists assume they are allies of the Crusaders that attacked their country.

And those weapons of mass destruction that the Democratic leadership authorized Bush to find and destroy? They did not exist.

Then there was the George Bush-Teddy Kennedy No Child Left Behind deal, which doubled spending at the Department of Education.

How did that work out?

Hundreds of billions sunk, test scores stagnant or dropping and teachers caught cheating on behalf of students to get test scores back up to keep the NCLB money flowing.

The racial gap endures, and though we spend more per capita on education than any nation save Luxembourg, we are getting creamed in international competition by East Asians and Europeans.

The response to this disaster?

"We need bipartisan agreement to invest more in education."

Did not Albert Einstein define insanity as doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result? Why would we give more money to an education establishment that has consumed the wealth of an empire and failed us for 40 years?

Bipartisan big deals gave us Vietnam, Iraq, the Reagan and Bush 1 tax hikes, NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, No Child Left Behind and prescription drug benefits under Medicare. Bipartisan big deals led America to the brink of bankruptcy.

When JFK wrote "Profiles in Courage," it was not about the dealmakers like LBJ, but the men who stood apart and stood alone for what was right.

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

The redeeming feature of knockdown-drag-outs, by whomsoever initiated and howsoever decided, is that they focus attention on matters too urgent to be laid aside for future contemplation. In which category is the debt-ceiling brawl. It's like a family intervention over Dad's unseemly craving for Old Grand-Dad. The music has got to be faced.

The tune playing on the national Muzak for some decades is, ironically, that old Depression-era favorite, "We're in the money, Come on my honey, Let's spend it, lend it, send it, rolling along."

"How'd we get here?" is the question whose answer is, "Big Government, playing to our appetites."

"Big Government" long since became a political cliche—a standard substitute for the kind of thinking that might have identified and addressed the problem at its source. "Big Government" means government that helps everybody by spending money that belongs to nobody. Nobody in particular, anyway. We all put some in the pot, otherwise known as the Treasury. Who knows where it gets spent? Who can begin to imagine? "Big Government" means, accordingly, the evasion of responsibility: the ducking of duty to taxpayers.

The problem America remains unable to face—witness the current meat-cleaver massacre of cooperation in Washington—is how not just to get past the current wrangle over the debt ceiling, but to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen again anytime soon.

The only way to make sure it doesn't reoccur is to follow more or less the House's passionate inclination and inform, most of all, the White House that we're NOW going to stop spending money we haven't got.

This makes for, in the oddest kind of way, a wonderful moment, a delicious one. One that's been too long in coming. To paraphrase the unexceptionable motto of Rahm Emanuel, we can't let this crisis go to waste.

Big Government and fiscal integrity aren't merely strange bedfellows. Eventually, though it takes time, as in our own country's experience, they become the political equivalent of Bordeaux and peanut-butter sandwiches. The sheer bigness of Big Government decrees this outcome. The more Government does, the more it gets called on to do. The more it accepts the call, the more heedless it becomes of apparent trivialities such as cost.

The debate over the size of government is one Americans have been trying to have since the Reagan years, rarely succeeding, in that the crisis was not quite bad enough. We can't make that claim anymore. Don't we suppose the Greeks—who are broke—are having such a debate? They are talking of nothing else.

Here we come now, animated by the same concerns as the Greeks and Portuguese and Spanish and Irish and Italians over what was once generally known as improvidence.

The question is: How well are we prepared to let the federal government absorb 25 percent of our economic output, not to mention the 40 or 50 percent that lies in our collective future unless the brakes are applied fast and hard?

That's what the whole unappealing, unappetizing debate is about in the end—how hard to hit the brakes so the private sector of the economy, instead of for once the public sector, can start growing again, creating jobs and prosperity.

A crisis indeed is a terrible thing to waste. Our finger-pointing, perpetually annoyed president, who loves Big Government so much he's worked to make it bigger ever since taking office, agrees with the Emanuel maxim, sort of. He just wants to define the crisis himself. The tea party Republicans and their allies won't let him, and that explains the sound and fury, and, well, isn't it all in a grim way kind of wonderful?

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM