America is under attack—from within. American Manifesto identifies the enemy—self-serving federal legislators—and proposes a peaceful, legal solution: depriving them of re-election.

American Manifesto highlights the current decline and envisions the possible destruction of the United States of America. It places responsibility on the self-serving and self-perpetuating behavior of the United States senators and representatives who have spent and borrowed us to the brink of financial collapse. By pandering to the American Left, labor unions, lawyers, environmentalists, and other vote-buying interests instead of conscientiously serving us by effectively addressing our excessive spending, the insolvency of entitlement programs, our arbitrary and unduly burdensome tax laws, and the erosion of our military strength and international standing, these professional politicians have our once-great country on the brink of ruin.

American Manifesto proposes to make federal legislators work for us rather than themselves in the only way possible—and outlines just how this can be done.

AMERICAN MANIFESTO

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Contents

Chapter 1. The Problem, the Struggle, and the Solution................................................1Chapter 2. Micawber's Advice on Financial Responsibility..............................................12Chapter 3. Human Character and American Federal Lawmakers: The Solution Explained.....................18Chapter 4. The American Left: its Control over Politicians............................................34Chapter 5. A Free-Market Economy, or an American Brand of Socialism?..................................43Chapter 6. Relations between Nations are Not about Friendship.........................................58Chapter 7. The Iraq War, Pandering Politicians, and Our Safety........................................71Chapter 8. Iran: Looming Disaster.....................................................................85Chapter 9. The Labor Unions...........................................................................90Chapter 10. The Environment, the Environmentalists, and the Politicians...............................100Chapter 11. The Plaintiffs' Trial Lawyers.............................................................108Chapter 12. Federal Taxation, Fair and Unfair.........................................................114Chapter 13. What Health Care Crisis?..................................................................121Chapter 14. Social Security...........................................................................128Chapter 15. Pressure from Both Sides..................................................................133Chapter 16. The Only Solution.........................................................................137

Chapter One

American Manifesto identifies and explains what I consider the most dangerous and destructive problem faced by the United States of America and its people. This problem has caused a decline in the economic strength, the international standing, the military effectiveness, and the national character of the greatest nation ever to exist. The problem has brought our country uncomfortably close to potential economic collapse as the result of grossly excessive federal spending and borrowing of money. The problem, to which I propose the solution, is the self-serving, self-promoting, and self-perpetuating behavior of our elected federal legislators, the United States senators and the members of the House of Representatives.

Unlike in Revolutionary War times—when national and personal survival were at stake and federal legislators had compelling reasons to act in the best interests of the new nation—too many of today's senators and representatives act like guests who don't know when to go home. They presume their hosts' hospitality as an obligation and view their hosts' money and other property as their own. They vote and otherwise act to advance their own interests, to the exclusion of and to the detriment of our interests and those of our nation.

American Manifesto explains how and why that selfish and abusive behavior takes place and examines its consequences. This writing proposes the way to end it, which will require our elected lawmakers to legislate in the best interests of the United States of America, instead of in ways designed to serve their own interests. The solution is to remove reelection entirely from the senatorial and congressional picture. The only way to accomplish that is to limit federal lawmakers in both houses of Congress to a single term of, say, four years, to be served in only one of the two federal legislative bodies.

While arrogant and selfish conduct of federal lawmakers has been with us since the birth of our nation, it has reached extreme levels. The Constitution established the Senate and House of Representatives to serve us, not to rule us, but that important distinction is not being observed by senators and representatives. Too many members of the Senate and House see themselves as ruling elites and wish to maintain that status.

Federal legislative misfeasance and malfeasance have become intolerable and require correction, partly because many federal lawmakers act like rulers instead of public servants, but also because of a titanic and nation-defining internal conflict that has our country at its most important crossroads since the Civil War. Throughout history bad things have happened to nations when the personal interests of their leaders have taken precedence over the national interest. The selfish conduct of our federal lawmakers, in combination with the internal struggle in which we are engaged, may mean disaster for the United States. The internal conflict, like the American Civil War, has been developing for decades. Unlike that war, this struggle is not an armed conflict. However, its outcome, like that of the Civil War, will have a profound and lasting effect on the strength, prosperity, and character of our nation.

The first important phase of the struggle was the New Deal, which was a product of the Great Depression and federal legislators who favored increased state control of private business activity as the antidote to the economic woes of the time. They determined that the federal government should manipulate the American economy and the behavior of Americans by taxation, spending, and regulation of private industry. The New Deal and the social legislation enacted during the 1930s, affirmed by federal courts that treated the Constitution like a used rubber band, were an unprecedented expansion of the federal government's power as it dictated the behavior of private citizens and businesses. The New Deal was popular with those who, directly or indirectly, received money taxed from others, and it was bitterly criticized by those who did the paying. Politicians in both major parties learned from the New Deal experience that the votes they needed to keep them in power could be bought with other peoples' money. That has been proven to be a hard lesson to unlearn.

As the Great Depression dissolved into World War II, a crisis that deprived America of the chance to determine whether government control of the economy was beneficial or detrimental, another aspect of the growing division became manifest. It had to do with loyalty and national security. It grew out of the war and the rise of the Soviet Union as an aggressive world power. On one side of the struggle were some high-level federal employees who, both during and after World War II, were Soviet sympathizers and, in some cases, outright Soviet agents. On the other side were senators, congressmen, and FBI agents who tried to expose the sympathizers. It was unclear whose side the various government officials who protected and defended the sympathizers were on.

The conflict intensified in the 1960s, to the accompaniment of expanding non-military government spending, defeatism, illegal drug use, and unprecedented unwed parenthood funded by the government. The Watergate affair, which demolished a president and weakened the presidency, was an opportunity that became a victory for one side. The general election in November 2008, with the ascendancy of President Barack Hussein Obama and far-left leaders of both houses of Congress, was a major victory for that side and a devastating, but possibly instructive, blow to the other.

The struggle is between ideas, ideologies, and opinions, but tangible things of...