We say “Washington,” for instance, to loosely refer to the U.S. government and expect everyone to understand. No one parses the gaps between those supposedly comprised by the image (e.g., every executive-branch official who works in Washington, with the possible exception of Dick Cheney), and those perhaps falsely implicated (other U.S. government officials, such as members of Congress who oppose the president’s policies).

Lately we’ve heard so much about “Wall Street” and “Main Street” that foreigners might think America comes divided not into states or counties, or red and blue, but boulevards, highways, and the like. Yet lots of very different people have lived at both addresses. Part of figuring out where one stands intellectually amid the financial meltdown of the moment requires absorbing the disparate images and associations we identify with both phrases. Some book-assisted reflection on them might help glib media pundits and officials to admit that both images, like “lipstick,” “white flag,” and other false designators suddenly assigned symbolic dimensions, do no one any good.

The first vaccine recommended against the Wall Street/Main Street bug is Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace (Yale University Press, 2008), the brief, trenchant history published earlier this year by Steve Fraser, author also of Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life and a senior lecturer in history at the University of Pennsylvania. Had John McCain read it on that now-famous flight back to Washington, he might have a clearer picture of the position he’d like to take on the crisis, and not be bearing so many blows over his “been there, not sure what I did” intervention into the negotiations.

Fraser wastes no time outlining Wall Street’s contradictory “paradoxical history in American culture” as a “hot zone of credulous fools and knowing gamesmen,” a place that “defies the very orderliness, discipline, and self-abnegating labor of the capitalism it presumably embodies and symbolizes.”

As “protean metaphor,” Fraser writes, Wall Street has stood for, among other notions, “the rich, big business, the ‘money power,’ parvenu greed, financial piracy, high society on parade, moral and sexual prostitution, Jewish or Anglo-Saxon or capitalist conspiracy, Yankee parasitism, the American Century, the land of Aladdin, and a good deal more.”

Wall Street, in short, stands for such an astounding range of financial activities and behaviors, from the deceptions of a Charles Ponzi to the admired stewardship of “heroic savior” J.P. Morgan, that it’s virtually meaningless as a description. Are we equally angry, after all, at hedge-fund traders, “credit swap” inventors, and the friendly guy at the downtown Charles Schwab?

Fraser seeks to bring some conceptual order to his amorphous subject by singling out four Wall Street “apparitions” — “the aristocrat, the confidence man, the hero, and the immoralist” — who, “while hardly exhausting Wall Street’s metaphorical mother lode, have proven the most durable and capacious.”

The historical tale he tells makes many stops, noting Jefferson’s condemnation of counterrevolutionary “tories” on the Street fattening themselves on public credit, the principled efforts of Alexander Hamilton to establish a sophisticated financial system for the young United States, the crimes of Michael Milken and of Enron, and the efforts of ex-Goldman Sachs boss Henry Paulson to save our financial system today. It provides edifying, entertaining confirmation of how frequently all four types pop up.

It also offers other useful, overarching interpretive themes. Throughout Wall Street’s history of generating paper wealth, including the denunciations of “moneycrats” during what Twain dubbed “The Gilded Age,” a steady portion of Americans have remained suspicious. Despite their natural bent toward risk and enterprise (in America, 19th-century observer Jeremiah Church opined, “every man is a speculator”), and notwithstanding the “democratizing” of the Street over the last half-century to include the small investor, Americans have often expressed the view that Wall Street “amassed its fabulous riches like a parasite, living off the fruits of the honest labor of impoverished farmers, sweated industrial workers, and self-sacrificing, frugal entrepreneurs” who “kept faith with the moral strictures of the work ethic.”

Long before red/blue splits, leaders like James Madison had to guard against an America divided between hardworking laymen and oligarchic capitalists, a factionalism that, nowadays, gets dubbed “class warfare.” It’s sobering to be reminded, deep as we’ve come into the age of commercial paper and “financialization” of the economy, of Teddy Roosevelt’s inveighing against “malefactors of great wealth,” Woodrow Wilson’s charge that the “Money Trust” controlled “both credit and enterprise,” and FDR’s attack on “unscrupulous money changers.”

Ultimately, however, even Fraser’s four-character schema brings us round to the same clear lesson: If you want to speak clearly and responsibly about the financial crisis, to guard against class-warfare battles, you’ve got to talk specifics, not synecdoches. Otherwise, those masses of ordinary Americans who e-mailed and called their representatives to oppose the initial bailout bill could get out of hand. We need to distinguish between innocent “Wall Streeters” and those who practice what the playwright Bronson Howard once called “the fiercest kind of gambling in the world … a thousand times deadlier than Monte Carlo.”

If Fraser delivers the historical overview that rightly shatters “Wall Street” into scores of distinguishable addresses, a few other books round out the picture. Charles R. Morris’s The Trillion Dollar Meltdown (Public Affairs, 2008) presciently published in March, delivers the best technical explanation of what’s happening now.

Charles Ellis’s The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs (Penguin Press, 2008), with its comprehensive story of that ne plus ultra firm and its former boss Hank Paulson, who “was all about careful plans and always had everything worked out in advance,” displays in astonishing detail the mad, hubristic intensity of the world that makes money on money. Even Ellis, the longtime managing partner of a strategy-consulting firm who won significant cooperation from normally tight-lipped Goldman Sachs execs while resisting a hagiographic history, can’t help gushing that Goldman had become (at least when he submitted his manuscript!) a firm that “operates with almost no external constraints in virtually any financial market it chooses, on the terms it chooses, on the scale it chooses, when it chooses, and with the partners it chooses.”

That cockiness receives its antidote in another eyeopener on the way, Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity (W.W. Norton, 2008). An anthology edited by none other than Liar’s Poker author Michael Lewis, it aims to “re-create the most recent financial panics, in an attempt to show how financial markets now operate.” Lewis points out that the 1987 crash marked the beginning of something new: “a collapse brought about not by real or even perceived economic problems but by the new complexity of financial markets.” Fast-forward to the end of 2006 when, “according to the Bank for International Settlements, there was $415-trillion in derivatives — that is, $415-trillion in securities for which there is no completely satisfactory pricing model.” Not everyone who lives on “Wall Street” deserves blame for that.

And as long as you’re patronizing a Lewis, why not take a look at Main Street (1920) by Sinclair Lewis, the novel by America’s first Nobel laureate in literature that made the other pole of our synecdoche circus a household phrase? Far from endorsing the current sense of the metaphor as a home for good, decent, hardworking Americans abused by Wall Street, Lewis saw his book as denouncing, in Matthew Bruccoli’s words, “the myth of wholesome small-town America.” Indeed, in his 1930 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Lewis declared that he’d meant to oppose the fictional tradition that “all of us in mid-Western villages were altogether noble and happy.” Rather, Lewis said he had learned from Hamlin Garland that “mid-Western peasants sometimes were bewildered and hungry and vile.”

Fraser, surprisingly, given the force of right-eous indignation toward financiers’ chicanery that he documents throughout American history, suggests toward the end of his book that America’s sense of violation by Wall Street at its worst “has shrunk in our own day, supplanted by an air of comic bemusement and ironic detachment.” More recent remarks by Fraser to journalists indicate he may be revising that view. Simple lesson: When sizing up Wall Street, you can never be sure what’s happening until the final bell.

An indisputable conclusion, nonetheless, is that Gordon Gekko doesn’t live on “Wall Street” any more than the rest of us live on “Main Street” — or receive our mail at General Post Office. If Americans are to work through this mess and demand the naming of names, we need precise addresses too.

Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 55, Issue 8, Page B4

Within that framework, Nuttle notes that most commentators in the
national media surmise that middle America “is about a 5” in terms
of philosophy. In that set of assumptions, the late President
Ronald Reagan and like-minded conservative Republicans were, as
Nuttle says, “on the media’s scale, out of the mainstream.”

Nuttle’s scale puts the national press corps at 4 on his scale, and
comments that they sincerely believe they are “closer to the
center” of political gravity than Reagan, et al. But America’s
operative working conservative majority, which Nuttle and others
characterize as center-right, actually amounts to more than 60% of
the population, meaning the “mainstream” is closer to 10 than to 1.

The “basic electorate average” is 7.5, not 5, in Nuttle’s analysis.
Thus, quite “conservative” individuals in politics actually fall
closer, he contends, to the true mainstream than the so-called
“mainstream press.” The national press actually falls several steps
away from the “middle,” in this view.

Recently, in press interviews, Nuttle has put Alaska Gov. Sarah
Palin at 8 on his left-to-right scale. This explains, in Nuttle’s
view, why the media’s reaction to Palin was initially and continues
to be so vitriolic – and why she immediately added several
percentage points of electoral value as Sen. John McCain’s
vice-presidential running mate.

Nuttle’s book is a cornucopia of insight and sagacity. He details
his premises, leaving readers freedom to agree or disagree
knowledgeably as they seek to put themselves at one point or
another on that 1 to 10 scale.

Reading Marc Nuttle’s book can make a significant contribution to
the self-examination, introspection and political deliberation
appropriate to troubled times.

About the author: Pat McGuigan is an Oklahoma City journalist, and
a regular contributor to The American Objective.

These comments are intended for the human heart, not for balloting.
In a volatile election year, a time Oklahoma author Marc Nuttle
deems a “moment of truth,” American conservatives have lived
through what Charles Dickens deemed the best of times, and the
worst of times.

Those paying attention went from despondency as the preferred
candidates of most conservatives faded in spring primaries, to
near-euphoria after Sen. John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as
his running mate, then back to despair as the breadth of the
massive federal bailout of banks and lenders became clear in late
September.

No one is being marched to the guillotine, and most of us won’t
have to worry, as do our soldiers in Baghdad or Kabul , whether or
not we will face a hail of terrorist bullets on the next drive or
walk. But still, the last few months in America , with a whirlwind
reaped from bad seeds planted over decades, were consequential.

Nuttle told a group of friends at a recent luncheon that one U.S.
Senate staffer told him the choice faced in the bailout decision
was not between bad and good, but between “worse and worser.”
That’s bad grammar, but a good point. A time of crisis, more than
any other, compels that we turn to ways of wisdom, looking at the
totality of issues, and the importance of fundamental principles.

Politics is the art of the possible, not achievement of the
perfect. Ideas count, and fundamental differences in philosophy
have divided the two presidential candidates in 2008. One wants to
impose on business automatic minimum-wage hikes, unfunded health
care mandates, restoration of monopoly powers through the “card
check” syst em designed to kill the secret ballot in union
organizational votes, and further politicization of pension and
retirement systems. The other fellow opposes all those things.

As for that bailout, whether the cost is $700 billion or $2.5
trillion, no one really knows what dramatic federal maneuvers will
yield. Maybe the government will eventually make the money back, as
was the case with earlier Chrysler and S&L bailouts–bad economics
but perhaps tolerable public policy. Maybe bad debt will provide a
way to leverage more Americans into equity.

The next few years will tell if America will join Europe in
democratic socialism, or turn back to traditions of “American
exceptionalism,” a sense of destiny and purpose rooted in liberty
and a federalist system. Nothing is inevitable, but conservatives
better act as if they mean it when they say, “Never again.”

Times such as these might educate us on the limits of politics, and
the wisdom of that federalist system. We might concentrate on these
things: hearth, home, personal behavior, neighborly living, and
direct engagement with those around us. In such arenas, we are best
equipped to deal with what comes down upon us from Washington , or
elsewhere.

In the end, after a lot of suffering and economic failures, rough
times might, in the design of Providence , resurrect deeper
appreciation for neighbors and friends, and political engagement in
which we talk to–not at or past–fellow citizens.

Perhaps these trying times will br ing support for new local
entrepreneurs, of the type who once characterized communities,
people missed in the days of big box stores. Commercial links at
the scale of towns, cities, states, and regions might replace
hedging and greed. That might bring a stronger conservatism to
preserve what is best in our past without living in fear of the
future.

Such things might as well begin right here in Oklahoma . In the
voice of one memorable character in “The Lord of the Rings,” the
late J.R.R. Tolkien reflected that none of us can choose the times
in which we live. What we can do is decide what to do with the time
we have left.

Let it be: “We are not among those who draw back and perish, but
among those who have faith and live” (Hebrews 10:39, NAB). Back to
basics.

Patrick B. McGuigan (M.A., Oklahoma State University ) is a
research fellow at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs and an
editor at The City Sentinel in Oklahoma City . The author of two
books and the editor of seven, he is currently writing a biography
of former Oklahoma County District Attorney Robert H. Macy.

Tourism is also a major source of cash for the city as it reigns as one of the country’s top 10 tourist attractions. The city boasts close to 2,000 restaurants and hundreds of hotels. In 2004 16.3 million visitors flooded the city and spent $7.9 billion.

Boston is one of the nation’s foremost fishing port and wool market—and more than two million pounds of fish are caught in the waters in and around the city annually.

FOX Business reporter Shibani Joshi heads back to her hometown to prove American prosperity is alive and well.

Boston by the Numbers

0 The number of tickets left for the 2003 Boston Red Sox and 2003-2004 Patriots home games

Feel like a bowl of chowder? Get ready to pay $4, the average price for a bowl in Boston

The unemployment rate sits at 4.6% in the city

Greater Boston CVB

Close to 70% of housing units in Boston are occupied by renters

For a two-bedroom apartment Bostonians pay $1,343/month, on average.

In 2003, the median household income was $42,567

About 250,000 college students live in Boston

Nearly 600,000 people call Boston home
Welcome to Harvard Business School

Harvard Business School is one of the most renowned business schools in the world and is legendary for its unique “case method” technique. Lectures, simulations and field work are also combined with this technique, but more than 80% of classes are built on the case method.

Faculty members spend weeks at different companies researching the situation—getting details of the problem, any decisions and the perspective of managers involved and then present the fully-detailed case to students to solve. Students scrutinize around 14 cases a weeks that have no obvious right answer. Students ponder the problems individually for a couple hours by conducting quantitative analysis and then test their thinking with a study group before class. Classrooms for the business school are set up amphitheater style to encourage discussions, and almost every class is starts with a “cold call” from the professor to a student to open a case. During their freshmen year, each student is cold-called at least once, but they get no warning so preparation is vital.

Advocates for the case method technique say it is the most demanding and provocative way to learn leadership skills applicable in the business world.

Watch the video to see Harvard Business School Professor Bill Sahlman discuss the relevance of the MBA in today’s rocky market.

A Glance in the Rearview Mirror

1.) What has changed about your hometown the most since you left?

Red Sox nation took on new fervor after breaking the long-standing “Curse of the Bambino“ with the Red Sox winning the 2004 and 2007 world series. All those Sox believers’ efforts paid off! I wish I was living in Boston at the time…what a life experience that would have been…but I have faith. The run isn’t over yet! I never really followed baseball until I moved to Boston…because it isn’t a game, it’s a religion there.

2.) What one characteristic in your life now do you credit your hometown for planting in you?

It’s hard to separate Boston from my experience of attending Harvard Business School. The school instilled me with a higher degree of confidence, challenged my thinking, opened up a new threshold of possibilities and gave me a greater sense that I have responsibility in creating greater good. When I think back to my time in Boston, that is what I credit the city and school for planting in me.

3.) What do you miss the most?

I miss the Charles River. For lots of reasons… my rowdy friends and I would tailgate watching the Head of Charles (the annual crew races) in an all-day affair. I often would run or rollerblade along the Charles to clear my head after a long day of school and sit along the banks with friends on a lazy Saturday afternoon. My apartment overlooked the Charles and my roommate at the time, Margaret, and I would often sit on the balcony and have the best conversations. Some days, friends and I would walk all the way from Boston along the river back to campus just to take in the view of the Charles.

4) Given the chance, would you move back? Why?

Absolutely! Boston has so much to offer its residents. You can attend a world class educational institution or work at some of the biggest and most highly-regarded companies in the world and have a life at the same time! Boston is such a “work hard, play hard” city that offers balance for those who want it. You can live in the suburbs and work in the city and the drive doesn’t take hours. You can escape to the Cape during the summers, take in a Pats or Celtics game or take your kids some of the most important historical sites in American history. There is so much the city has to offer.

5.) What economic opportunity has your hometown lost?

Well I don’t know if you can call Tom Brady an economic opportunity, but if you could, that would be it! Arguably one of the best QBs in the game out for the season is a huge loss - emotionally and economically, I would imagine. Thought the Pats are doing pretty well without him and are giving competitors a run for their money so far!

6.) What does your hometown not get enough credit for?

Being such a livable city. You can work at world-class top private equity firm, consumer products company, consulting firm, biotech firm or university and still have time to see your kids, afford a home and enjoy life. That is a highly undervalued virtue in today’s hectic times.

Originally published:
September 19, 2008 9:51AM
Opportunity in America: Boston
By FOXBusiness.com

Hockey moms and capital markets
By Spengler

Why do Asian investors depend on American capital markets? Given the near breakdown of key sectors of the American market, one might expect Asians to bring their money home. Quite the opposite has happened: Asian currencies have fallen sharply against the American dollar.

On my desk is a draft paper by a prominent Asian politician, sent to me privately for comment. It calls on Asians to take charge of their own financial destiny and invest their money in Asian markets rather than into the maelstrom of American markets. Privately, I advised the leader in question not to publish it. It will

do no good. Asian capital markets cannot absorb Asia’s savings.

What does America have that Asia doesn’t have? The answer is, Sarah Palin - not Sarah Palin the vice presidential candidate, but

Change vs US$,
June 2-Oct 2
Currency %

Thai Baht

-3%

Singapore Dollar

-5%

Malaysian Ringgit

-6%
Philippine Peso -8%
Indian Rupee -9%

South Korean Won

-14%
Sarah Palin the “hockey mom” turned small-town mayor and reforming Alaska governor. All the PhDs and MBAs in the world can’t make a capital market work, but ordinary people like Sarah Palin can. Laws depend on the will of the people to enforce them. It is the initiative of ordinary people that makes America’s political system the world’s most reliable.

America is the heir to a long tradition of Anglo-Saxon law that began with jury trial and the Magna Carta and continued through the English Revolution of the 17th century and the American Revolution of the 18th. Ordinary people like Palin are the bearers of this tradition.

Outside of the United States, the young governor of Alaska has become a figure of ridicule - someone who did not own a passport until last year and who quaintly believes that her state’s proximity to Russia gives her insights on foreign policy. How, my European friends ask, was it possible for such an an ignorant bumpkin to become a candidate for America’s second-highest office? They don’t understand America.

Provincial America depends on the initiative of ordinary people to get through the day. America has something like an Education Ministry, but it has little money to dispense. Americans pay for most of their school costs out of local taxes, and levy those taxes on themselves. In small towns, many public agencies, including fire protection and emergency medical assistance, depend almost entirely on volunteers. People who tax themselves, and give their own time and money for services on which communities depend, are not easily cowed by the federal government or by large corporations.

Palin’s career may look like a poor imitation of a Preston Sturges script, but films such as Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) struck a chord with Americans precisely because the character type of the ordinary man or woman who takes on entrenched interests is instantly recognizable in America.

Palin really did take on the American oil companies and turn the scoundrels out of office. Her predecessor, Frank Murkowski, appointed her to the state oil and gas commission in the apparent belief that a small-town mayor and former beauty queen would rubber-stamp corrupt deals between the state and the Big Oil companies.

Shades of Jimmy Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Palin ran against Murkowski and took his job. That does not qualify her to be president, to be sure, but it does show cunning and strength of character. Palin is qualified for high office by temperament if not by education, and is preferable to candidates whose education has made no improvement on their characters.

The fact that ordinary people safeguard their rights and have the means to challenge established interests does not exclude the possibility of fraud on a grand scale.

Asian investors were cheated by a conspiracy of the financial industry and the ratings agencies, which sold them ostensibly low-risk securities that turned out to be toxic. The just-approved US$700 billion support package for American banks sets America back to a regime of oligarchy, according to New York Times columnist David Brooks. Despite this fraud and its attendant humiliation, and despite the deterioration of governance in American markets, Asian investors are putting more rather than less money into America, judging from the decline of Asian currencies against the dollar in the course of the crisis.

One doesn’t see demonstrations by wronged peasants in the small towns of America. There never were peasants - American farmers always were entrepreneurs - and the locals avenge injury by taking over their local governments, which have sufficient authority to make a difference. At the capillary level, school boards, the Parent Teachers’ Association, self-administered religious organizations and volunteer organizations incubate a political class entirely different from anything to be found in Asia. There are tens of thousands of Sarah Palins lurking in the minor leagues of American politics, and they are the guarantors of market probity.

“Hockey Moms,” to be sure, may not be the optimal promoters of America’s future. One for one, the “Piano Moms” of China are cleverer people and produce smarter offspring. China’s 30 million students of classical piano are one of the two great popular movements in the world today: the other is the House Church movement in Chinese Christianity. Children who play hockey will grow up to get coffee for children who study piano. As a pool of talent, nothing compares with the educated segment of the East Asian population that has embraced and mastered Western culture. Nonetheless, Asia still can’t invest its own money at home, and seems farther than ever from that objective.

It is true that Asian economies depend on American consumers and an American recession is bad for Asian currencies. But why don’t Asians consume what they produce at home? The trouble is that rich Asians don’t lend to poor Asians in their own countries. Capital markets don’t work in the developing world because it is too easy to steal money. Subprime mortgages in the US have suffered from poor documentation. What kind of documentation does one encounter in countries where everyone from the clerk at the records office to the secretary who hands you a form requires a small bribe? America is litigious to a fault, but its courts are fair and hard to corrupt.

Asians are reluctant to lend money to each other under the circumstances; they would rather lend money in places where a hockey mom can get involved in local politics and, on encountering graft and corruption, run a successful campaign to turn the scoundrels out. You do not need PhDs and MBAs for that. You need ordinary people who care sufficiently about the places in which they live to take control of their own towns and states when required. And, yes, it doesn’t hurt if they own guns. Popular gun ownership places a limit on the abuse of state power.
Proposals to expand Asian financial markets have been circulating for 20 years. In 1996, the old print edition of Asia Times (which ceased operations during the 1997 financial crisis) published an excellent little booklet on the subject of Asian fixed income markets, sponsored by Lehman Brothers, which also has ceased operations. The East Asia Pacific central banks launched flagship local currency bond funds in 2003 and 2004 with considerable fanfare.

Several months ago, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) reported, “With the credit squeeze in the United States imposing limits on many borrowers’ access to the market, some foreign companies are beginning to issue bonds within the Asia region … in February 2008, Lehman Brothers issued a S$250 million [US$171 million) five-year bond. It is the largest foreign issue in the Singapore market to date.” Lending money to the now-defunct Lehman Brothers was the one capital markets coup the ADB had to brag about in early 2008.

Asian capital markets never lost their baby teeth. By way of comparison, US fixed income markets at the end of 2007 had $30.146 trillion outstanding, or 220% of gross domestic product (GDP). East Asia’s fixed income markets, reports the Asian Development Bank, were only 46% of GDP. Asia’s fixed income markets are a quarter as America’s relative to GDP. That is why Asia’s retirement money must look for a home overseas.

Perhaps America’s fixed income markets expanded too fast. Mortgage-backed securities, for example, jumped from $2.36 trillion to $7.27 trillion during the decade through 2007, while Treasury debt only rose from $3.66 billion to $4.86 trillion. More than $2 trillion of the mortgage expansion occurred in the subprime or “alternative documentation” categories, which have lost roughly half their market value in the past 15 months.

The trouble, as I argued in May, is that the sausages - the derivative securities created out of the inedible scraps of the mortgage market - were subject to monstrously large demand from a world of aging savers (see The monster and the sausages, Asia Times Online, May 20, 2008).

This will only get worse. Twenty-eight percent of China’s population falls in the age cohort of 39-64 years, when individuals must put away most of their retirement savings. By 2025, the proportion will rise to 35%. (By contrast, America has 32% of its population in the 39-64 cohort today, but it will fall to 30% by 2025).

Originally published at: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JJ07Dj07.html

Sir Winston Churchill
British politician (1874 - 1965)

Replace “the truth” in the above quote with “traditional American values”. By George, you’ve got it!

Traditional American Values (TAV) is everywhere. We more than occasionally stumble over the good, the conservative, and the beautiful, but millions of us hold these values in our hearts … and not just in the heartland as is often heard. These are the grassroots good guys and gals who might stumble and pick themselves up. These are America’s pillars, and they probably don’t just “hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” That’s called grace.

Nope. Traditional American Values: not dead yet!

Google “traditional American values” and find more than 700,000 page hits. Now, not all of those pages play nice when it comes to defining and defending, But the numbers do indicate a lot of interest expressed for an issue or standard or doctrine.

The values message muddles in the world of punditry, politics and policy. And, once it gets translated into different “languages”, it gets lost in translation. There are 6,912 identified languages in the world today. Who knew we had created so many ways to misunderstand each other?

So, TAVers need to spread their American message in clear, understandable prose and policy. Whether it’s a Chicago twang, a California valley-girl sentence-ending up-SWING, or while “pahking the cah” in Bahston, the receiver of the message needs to be able to understand the message, or the voice of reason will fade and die.

Be concise. Not in a twenty-second-sound-bite way, but try not to wear out your voice or the receivers ear. Americans are only becoming more impatient, what with our Instant Messaging and LAN lines and high-speed connections. Carry on too long and you’ll lose ‘em as they start snoozin’.

TAVers should be aware of their surroundings at all times. Americans are inundated with information. They are flummoxed and frustrated and infuriated by the Spears sisters the Hilton sisters. TAVers prefer the Lennon Sisters, thank you very much (Google show 12,800 English pages for them). They’re not dead, either, by the way. Neither are their traditional American values dead.

TAVers live the message. Unless it’s Sarah Palin for V.P. garb, you won’t see the American value folks in pink protesting in the halls of Congress or anywhere else. Live the message.

So, what’s the message?

All might not agree with the Traditional Values Council’s view of the vision, but it’s enumerated this way:

1. Right to Life (against abortion of unborn fetuses and euthanasia in terminally ill patients)
2. Sexual fidelity in marriage and abstinence before marriage
3. Opposition to homosexuality and other “deviant sexual behaviors” (see below)
4. Opposition to pornography
5. Patriotism (supporting national boundaries, the Armed Forces, political participation, free enterprise, limited government, low taxes, personal responsibility, and Christian America as the New Israel of God’s Covenant to His People)
6. Freedom of religion
7. Addictive Behaviors (with opposition to gambling, the legalization of addictive drugs, alcohol, and smoking)

Live the message – Don’t kill the messenger. Go out there and make it a Traditional American Values day!

-Beverly Mills, Senior Contributor to American Objective

Tax cuts and spending are not the same. They do not have the same effect on the economy or on the federal budget. Tax cuts allow American workers, families, business owners, and investors to keep more of their own money. New spending requires the government to take control of a bigger slice of the economy. We recognize the problem is not that the American people are taxed too little, but that the federal government spends too much. To ensure that the federal government respects the burdens on taxpayers and spends only as much as is necessary to accomplish our common goals, we support extending the pay-as-you-go requirement for mandatory spending only.

Given the liberals frequent mention of the $4 trillion national debt, it seems gravely irresponsible to propose billions and billions of dollars in NEW spending, on top of our already rapidly growing entitlement commitments. What is perhaps most unbelievable, is that liberals seem to think the American people will believe that they can pay for all new spending, pay for existing entitlement increases and balance the budget simply by increasing taxes slightly on the “very rich”.

The key difference between liberals and conservatives on taxes go back to a basic difference on the problems the country faces. Liberals believe the basic problems a lot of Americans are facing right now can be solved if the Government has MORE money. They believe increasing the amount the “rich” pay, can help redistribute money to the less well-off through various government programs and initiatives. I, on the other hand, believe that the basic problems faced by most Americans these days, from healthcare, to energy, to education costs are because the average American needs MORE money and opportunity, not the government.

What is most disconcerting when thinking about what a liberal White House means to the taxes of the American people is this basic point. They can promise to only tax the rich, but once they accept the principle that economic hardship can be solved through increasing taxes, there is no telling where they will really stop. In the face of an economic slow-down, it seems the best way to create new jobs and generate more wealth for more Americans is to allow for reinvestment in the economy by starting new businesses, making capital improvements in them, and increasing banks’ monetary supplies through savings.

In a time of a slowing economy, why would we want to make the business climate increasingly worse? According to the National Institute for Labor Relations, states with so-called “Right to Work” laws experienced twice the job growth as “forced union” states from 1995-2005. In recent years, all of the new auto factories have been built in “Right to Work” states while states with the highest union membership per capita, like Michigan and Ohio, have gone through a sizeable downturn in their economy. Furthermore, a “forced union” requirement is a violation of one of America’s greatest constitutional rights, namely, freedom of association.

When it comes to paycheck protection statutes, it is purely a matter of principle. When a union member pays union dues, some of that money matriculates into a political fund to give contributions to candidates and conduct independent expenditure campaigns, often for causes and candidates whose values run contrary to those of the union member. There have even been instances where a union member, who decided to run for office, ends up contributing to their competitor through this system.

Davis-Bacon laws, originally drafted by Republicans in the early part of the 20th century, are costly and often a roadblock to progress in that they force the federal government to pay the “prevailing” wage in the area for any project work done on its behalf. However, Democrats oppose any suspension of such laws in the event of a natural disaster or other declared emergency, often times slowing reconstruction and hindering the recovery of areas hit hardest by an emergency.

Furthermore, the naiveté behind the liberal position is astounding. What is to be accomplished by meeting directly with murderous dictators without preconditions other than to validate them to their people? The dictators in Iran already know the stakes, they already know where the West stands, and so what is it that these meetings intend to accomplish? What compromise can there be?