SHUT DOWN! (or) Who totaled Detroit?

  

 “…in the real world they’re shuttin’ Detroit down.” –popular Country tune

Once upon a time in America there was a mighty metropolis boasting the most original and stunning architecture in the country. It made significant contributions to the performing arts from orchestral concerts to pop music, it set trends for innovation in radio and the burgeoning business of television, in construction and education; and in every aspect of that far-flung and thriving market economy engendered by the wealth of the industrial revolution and rekindled in the boom days following World War II, Detroit excelled….and at the very heart of this, a mighty pulse driven by the creative and productive life-force of the automotive industry beat resoundingly. At its peak Detroit boasted a population of nearly two million, and this population included communities of well-housed, well educated, and gainfully employed blacks most of whom emanated from nuclear families within a healthy and expanding urban middle class.  Three metropolitan dailies, the Detroit Times, News and Free Press chronicled events and yes, even the Detroit Lions even played football well—do you doubt us? Quarterbacks Bobby “Night Train” Layne and Tobin Rote led the Lions to legendary victories and championship games, clobbering the Browns in ’52, and the 49ers and the Browns in ’57.  Layne alone captained the Lions to three NFL championship games ensuring the motor city  more than a decade of Hall of Fame football, but following injuries to his leg received in a pile-on, Layne was hastily traded to the Pittsburgh Steelers, and thus ensued the legend of his curse.

Louis Kamper’s book tower is an example of Detroit’s extraordinary architecture.

According to the legend, upon departing for Pittsburgh, Layne cried out that in retribution for its ingratitude, Detroit would not win another championship for 50 years. And they haven’t. Heck, it’s been 55 years, and the curse remains intact! It might be tempting to infer that Layne’s curse, like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow in Chicago, created massive, if unintentional, collateral damage—but this is unfair to Layne. In fact, an amalgam of forces conspired to devastate Detroit, sharing no common thread except liberalism in ever-increasing doses, for as students of the phenomenon are well aware, the most pernicious singularity of liberalism is its proneness to create emergencies that to the untutored observer seem resolvable only by the application of more liberalism, until finally nothing remains and the media change the subject, or assign blame elsewhere. The first liberal scourge to afflict Detroit was Unions—or perhaps we should say the co-opting and subornment of Union leadership by communists. Communists in Detroit autoworker unions? Nonsense, you say—the American autoworker would never have abided any such thing, particularly in the era under discussion. But as is almost invariably the case, the solid citizens who paid their union dues never knew anything about it.

Both Soupy Sales and the Lone Ranger originated in Detroit!

Who was Walter Reuther?

If you grew up in or around Detroit in the ‘40s or ‘50s you were taught by newsreels and social-studies lecturers that Walter Reuther, the head of the UAW, was as staunchly American as apple pie and stood courageously against the forces of communism in the automotive manufacturing arena. Flapdoodle and balderdash, Woofketeers! Comrade Reuther was the devoted son of a German socialist. Young Walter quit his job with the Ford motor company to emigrate to the Soviet Union where he helped establish Soviet auto plants between 1933 and ’35, while steeping himself in Marxist doctrine. Returning to America he joined the UAW, the Socialist Party, and the Communist Party USA. Following World War II, Reuther affected an anti-Communist position while working within the Democratic party to further the destruction of capitalism. He founded the subversive Americans for Democratic Action and led the United Auto Workers in sundry negotiations with Detroit’s “big three” auto manufacturers, cooperating closely with FDR, Truman, and Lyndon Johnson in the establishment of socialist/syndicalist dominance of manufacturing in America. Barry Goldwater took to the Senate floor in 1958 to call Reuther and the UAW a “more dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do to America,” but as usual, America’s horn-rimmed Cassandra went unheeded and Unions continued to tighten their strangle hold on the manufacturers in Detroit and elsewhere. Reuther died in a plane crash in 1970, but was posthumously given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton in 1995. He left the UAW permanently radicalized and remains the toast of radical Marxist websites…as well as the Clintons, evidently.

Walter Reuther (in front) and socialist/realist comrades marching toward soviet America

The Riot that missed

Nineteen-hundred and sixty seven was a particularly bad year for Detroiters. The oleaginous Lyndon Baines Johnson having only 3 years earlier bested (inexplicably) the afore-mentioned Barry Goldwater in the contest to become the nation’s first elected post-JFK president, took time away from his criminally inept Viet Nam policies to launch a flurry of equally ruinous and equally expensive social programs bundled under the rubric of “The Great Society.” And on July 23 of that “long, hot summer,” the Detroit riot broke out. It began on a Saturday night in the early-morning hours when Detroit police raided an unlicensed, after-hours bar and place of illegal gambling at 12th and Clairmount. Confrontations during the raid rapidly spread to the street outside and burst into the deadliest and most destructive riot in the Nation’s history. It was 5 bloody days before police, National Guard troops and the regular Army restored order. But if the violence was meant as a rebuke to white dominance of the national culture,  it missed its mark.  Hundreds of black businesses, buildings, and homes were reduced to rubble, and in the aftermath prosperous urban blacks and whites began to flock to the city’s suburbs, draining Detroit of a creative passion and industriousness—as well as an infrastructure and a tax base.

National Guard patrolling Linwood and Chicago on Detroit’s West Side–their stuff was made in Detroit too!

President Johnson’s response to the riot was to declare Detroit a “model city” for social engineering. His brain stormers devised hundreds of new welfare and anti-poverty projects meant to eliminate the perceived causes of urban violence—but just as aid to starving countries overseas is typically resold to the highest bidder by the despots du jure, the massive subsidization of Detroit’s poor resulted in sweetheart patronage deals and massive misappropriations of funding, while creating a financial impetus for the target population to remain or become all the things the projects sought to eliminate (because when you subsidize something you get more of it ). Thus, in the wake of “white flight” to the suburbs, which was in reality black and white flight, the neediest and most dysfunctional elements of the inner city population remained behind and found themselves mendicants subservient to Johnson’s welfare state, (did we mention he beat Goldwater?) which paid them to be single or unwed mothers, paid them to have more children out of wedlock, paid them to be hungry, paid them to be unemployed, and threatened to cut their benefits should they evince the slightest signs of upward mobility. Detroit’s financial situation plummeted and its homicide rate promptly quintupled. The family structure was demolished by Johnson, and Richard Nixon, who followed, announced that “we are all Keynesians now,” His administration, thus premised, did little to alter the city’s descent into poverty and dependency.

Johnson beat Goldwater by only 44 states–Barry should have demanded a recount!

Tora! Tora! Tora!

Came next the rapid spread of automotive creativity around the world. The Germans had always owned a minute percentage of the American auto market, but in the ‘70s the Japanese staged an automotive coups, rapidly gaining ground against Detroit, whose product was in most respects inferior to the unexpected flood of Hondas, Isuzus, Subarus and Mitsubishis, on top of which, American labor cost so much it was impossible to beat the low Japanese sticker prices. The unions wouldn’t budge, of course, so the “Big Three” took a nosedive—the first of many to follow—and Detroit lost more revenue and prestige.

Uh-ohhh!

The industry was in the process of taking its latest nosedive, seemingly into oblivion, when President Obama happened on the scene. Speaking of which, what’s bigger than a bread box, bigger than the State Department’s budget, bigger than all the foreign aid we extend other countries over the course of a year, and bigger than the funding for NASA?  Answer: The twenty-seven billion dollars President Obama handed the United Auto Workers union when he took over Chrysler and General Motors even as he fumed at Ford Motors for refusing to knuckle under to his economic goon squads. See, Our Beloved Leader didn’t actually bail out Detroit or even the auto industry so much as he handed a titanic wad of cash to the UAW and placed it in charge of what Karl Marx liked to call “the means of production.” And the disconcerting fact remains that the UAW didn’t need to be bailed out, its members were already making 70 dollars an hour. As Obama’s “car czar” Stephen Rattner admitted, “We did not ask any UAW member to take a cut in their pay.” No, the UAW got the business–it was the bond holders, those filthy capitalist pigs, who took a bath as Obama haughtily cheated them out of their investments and went out of his way to demolish non-union auto industries such as the Delphi plant in Ohio which was a primary parts supplier for General Motors. Here Obama blithely ignored 20,000 workers who lost benefits, pensions, and health care—the price of non-affiliation with the socialist totalitarian conspiracy. Moreover, WOOF knows that Tim Geitner, then at Treasury, spearheaded a direct and personal attack on Delphi workers at the behest of Our Dear Leader.

The Volt continues to hit snags on the highway to green-energy utopia.

But what of the motor city? What of Detroit? Detroit didn’t get much money, Woofketeers, because they weren’t tactically necessary to Obama’s advancement. Even the vast wealth that went to bolster GM and Chrysler boiled down to empowering and underwriting the UAW. Pursuit of Our Beloved Helmsman’s green energy fixation resulted in GM dropping all its significant research into fusion, canning anyone who knew how to make cars, killing off its most attractive lines of conventional autos and making lots of Volts instead. The Volt was going to get 200 miles to the gallon and revolutionize the car business—while keeping the planet green, of course. This is where the administration’s Wilsonian utopianism took over from its more cynical Marxist side and sank tons of your cash and our cash into producing a wonder car that ultimately got 35 miles per charge of electricity, could not be conveniently recharged without risking house fires, and occasionally shocked drivers in the process of shifting gears. To produce one Chevy Volt costs GM 41,000 dollars. The car can be purchased by you for 42, 000 dollars. But Americans don’t want to drive Volts. They want to drive Corvettes and Suburbans.  So sales for the Volt have been awful—and remain awful even now that Obama is willing to borrow ten-thousand dollars from Red China to pay you to purchase a Volt (they call it a rebate).

Home charging the Volt can be an expensive proposition….

So, sad story sadder, Detroit got no real boost from Dear Leader’s pipe dream of solar powered SUVs and managerially brilliant Union leaders taking over for the likes of Lee Iacocca or Alfred Pritchard Sloan. No, all it got was a commercial with Eminem trying to sound macho. In the auto industry, Ford, the American carmaker that refused to take Obama’s filthy lucre, has consistently outperformed the other two constituents of the “big three.” Chrysler has managed to regain some footing, posting an 8 percent improvement in June sales over last year. General Motors is claiming a 6 percent increase in the same time frame. But even if the auto industry can shake off Obama-ism and regain some of its former stature, it will be too late for the Motor City.

On October 13, 2012, while pursuing re-election, President Obama smiled his vacuous smile into the lens of an innocent TV camera and explained to the American people that he had saved Detroit. “We refused to throw in the towel and do nothing,” he said. “We refused to let Detroit go bankrupt, I bet on American workers and American ingenuity and three years later that bet is paying off in a big way.” Well, here it is 9 months later, and Detroit has gone bankrupt—can somebody find Eminem and ask him what’s up with this?  He pointed his finger right at us during that Super Bowl commercial and looked as threatening as a white kid who calls himself “Eminem” can mange to look, and gave us the impression that Detroit was saved by auto production, black choirs singing at the Fox Theater on Woodward Avenue (which thus far has escaped destruction, by the grace of God), and a bunch of scary socialist/realist art (forgive the tautology) which he showed us while singing (well, chanting) the city’s praises. No wonder they call him shady!  If Detroit is now a case of economic destitution, and believe us it is, why not ask for some more bailout money?

Well, more is definitely coming—Obama will “rescue” Detroit (again) in time for the 2014 elections, and it won’t make a dent in the city’s problems, but it will sound like the resurrection of Lazarus on the TV news, and nobody will address the main problem, which is that a city of dependents elects criminals and ne’er-do-wells who will maintain them on the doles, rather than innovators who will create jobs and opportunity. Former Detroit Mayor Coleman Young once said, “To attack Detroit is to attack black!” And a city that will not hear its critics will not be long deterred from the precipice. Former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick left for jail in 2008 in the throes of a sex and perjury scandal. Dave Bing is now mayor—his principle qualification being that he played basketball for the Detroit Pistons.

Detroit Councilman Kwame Kenyatta–just one of nine.

And what of the City Council members—are they in frenzied conclave to avert economic and sociopolitical destruction?  Detroit’s City Council is busy—too busy, in fact, for such divertissements. It just spent three days debating the wisdom of a resolution supporting a federal investigation into the culpability of  George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin. Readers will be reassured to learn that the Detroit City Council, after much focused discussion, voted unanimously to enjoin William Holder to press Federal charges against Zimmerman in the wake of his being found not guilty in Florida.  Detroit has meanwhile hosted 176 homicides thus far in 2013—and 70% of these are unsolved; but to attack Detroit, our gentle readers will recall, is to attack black. Fortunately, the establishment’s media remain alert to the true source of Detroit’s decline, and courageous enough to speak truth to power! MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry saw the problem in a heartbeat.  She explained that bankruptcy was the natural result of too little government. “This is what it looks like when government is small enough to drown in your bathtub and it is not a pretty picture,” she said. adding that Republicans want to turn all our cities into Detroit.  Always keen to ensure intellectual ballast, MSNBC provided next the acuities of Howard Dean, who assured Harris-Perry and her other guests that Detroit was going to be all right after all, because “When you have a median home price of $45,000, people are going to go buy those houses sooner or later.”  Right? 

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC? CHECK OUT THE PRESIDENT’S NEW COIN TRICK!

Suddenly, Americans are seeing the results of Obmanomics hit their pay checks—even though they aren’t “one percenters!” And there is a certain bitterness in the air—the kind of bitterness that naturally ramifies from being torn away from American Idol or Two and a Half Men by a reality check in the check book, and the fading certitude that all financial unpleasantness is somehow, however inexactly, the fault of George Bush. No, Americans are beginning to wake up and smell the borscht. And to a greater and greater extent, they are suspicious that the responsible cook lives in the White House. And as the tax hikes, the coming gun grab, and overt efforts to dispose of the

Of all the Obama miscreants, WOOF will miss Suzanne Barr at ICE–she was at least entertainingly lascivious.

constitution through executive orders become more blatant, these millions of newly attentive Americans will begin to sense that things are decidedly wrong, even if the major media marionettes they turn to for information aren’t mentioning the fact. Adding to the disquiet at this point may be the incremental up-tick in  how many of our heretofore unfocused countrymen are sensible of a kind of creeping immaturity in a government so constructed that the President is a guy who goes on The View and Pimp With a Limp but can’t be bothered to bestir himself to action while his Ambassador to Libya is raped and butchered and his bodyguards gunned down during a six-hour battle—a President who still hasn’t done a single thing about the attack or the murders four months later. Equally attention-worthy: a heartbeat from replacing this man is a guy who belongs in clown shoes and possesses the intelligence quotient of a gnat. A really dumb gnat. The treasury is still being run by a tax cheat, the Justice Department is in the hands of an outspoken racist who sold guns illegally to Mexican drug Lords for reasons he has yet to explicate while ICE was apparently led by a sex-obsessed blond —and the military is okay with Gays and multiculturalism but not so good with avoiding a decline in readiness decried even by Leon Panetta, the President’s man at defense, and has a demonstrated inability to disrupt nuclear arms development in Iran or North Korea while the President’s pick to run the CIA could not even keep his extramarital dalliance a secret– and the Secretary of State tripped and hit her head and got replaced while she was concussed by a guy with a plaque honoring him in Ho Chi Minh City. Meanwhile, things keep getting goofier on Capital Hill even as politics as usual seem to go on like a leisurely game of shuffleboard on the fantail of the plunging Titanic, and Obama’s chief economic advisers seem either to be Castro and Chavez…or just a bunch of Harvard professors who have exactly the same views on fiscal policy as Castro and Chavez.

Peter Sellers takes possession of the all-powerful Q-bomb in 1959’s ‘The Mouse that Roared;” Jean Seberg takes exception.

But this week brought news that was worthy of a Peter Sellers comedy of the “Mouse that Roared” stamp, conjuring vague recollections of the zany stunts self-elected Generalissimos used to pull in unpronounceable banana republics to everyone’s amusement in the late ‘50s. Yes, dear readers, this week was floated the idea that we could escape our current financial straits, recently exacerbated by such caprices as a“stimulus package” that transferred 8 trillion dollars to the public service sector and did nothing for the economy, an onrushing bevy of medical and social “reforms” that will cost five-to-seven times more than predicted, even though the predicted levels are themselves unaffordable, and fresh taxes.  And how will we escape the bite of these self-inflicted financial woes? With a magic talisman. That’s right. Shades of Tom Poston in “Zotz!” (In case you think you might remember Tom Poston but have no idea what “Zotz” was, that’s because “Zotz” was a William Castle film from 1962 that was so stupid, nobody could take it seriously, even as a comedy. In the movie, Poston discovers a magic coin that gives him all sorts of special powers, so that’s two things Castle’s movie has in common with this week’s weirdest news story from Obama Land—a magic coin, and stupid.  If you do remember “Zotz!” then you’ll have a slight conceptual advantage in the following discussion).

Tom Poston paves the way for post-rational economics

Okay, well it’s hard even to get a definite lead on who thought up “The Zotz Alternative” (it wasn’t Robert Ludlum, though) and while many are recommending it as brilliant, few are claiming authorship. To make matters stupider still, it appears that the actual person responsible for the idea of a salvific coin—one magic amulet fashioned of platinum designed to make our troubles disappear– is named Beowulf—or at least so he signs himself on the Firedoglake blogsite where the idea first materialized about a year ago. Beowulf’s genius, or comic genius, perhaps, was to point out some moribund laws from the 1990s that permit the Treasury Department to produce platinum coins whenever it feels so inclined, and apparently in any denomination it wishes. You can tell everyone was snoring when that masterpiece of legislative dopiness got gaveled into law, but nobody foresaw Obamanomics…or maybe a few people did! So, anyway, given this law—the original idea being that Treasury might occasionally wish to market novelty coins– it became apparent, at least to Beowulf, that Treasury could just as easily make itself a one-trillion dollar coin. Presto. Then the gang from Treasury takes

Coin advocate Krugman– among friends

the new, shiny platinum, one-trillion dollar coin, very carefully one imagines, down to the Fed, which we all know is just a communist front-entity disguised as a government building, and it deposits it. Ka-ching! And our utterly bankrupt government is suddenly solvent again! So this brainstorm apparently kicked around the blogosphere along with Bigfoot DNA and “chem trails” for a while, and would still be out there, one assumes, orbiting the planetoid Pluto if grown ups ran anything anymore, but alas, two of the most left wing (and media friendly) economists in the entire country, namely Paul Krugman and Mark Thoma found out about the idea. Krugman you probably know because he’s mouthy and obnoxious and likes to be on TV a lot, and tirelessly insists that President Obama is performing economic miracles everyday that are simply too subtle and ingenious for us to notice—and of course he got the 2008 Nobel Prize for this type of analysis, so you may rest assured he’s dismissible. Thoma hangs out at the University of Oregon, looks for green shoots indicative of recovery every summer, and writes editorials blaming the aftermath of the housing collapse on Ronald Reagan. He has yet to win the Nobel Prize, but we predict he’s a shoe-in when his turn comes. So as if these guys weren’t funny enough, they are now enamored of the one-trillion-dollar coin idea, and seriously advocating that Treasury go ahead and mint the sucker!

Now, you are very possibly sane, dear reader, because you are here, reading this, and that fact recommends you highly as somebody with some practical grey matter—and you therefore may be saying to yourself, “but, wait a minute, how could they possibly find enough platinum to make a one-trillion dollar coin out of? That much would be impossible to lay hands on, and impossible to make a coin out of, unless it was the size of that big tire outside Detroit’s Metropolitan Airport. ” And to that we say, yes, that’s true, you are absolutely correct—but you have committed the error of reckoning without liberal ridiculousness, once again asserting itself in this instance. You see, the coin doesn’t have to contain a trillion dollars worth of platinum. In fact, it doesn’t have to contain very much platinum at all to satisfy the law, and the Treasury can stamp any amount it wants on it—like, say—why not a trillion trillion? Zotz!  

Dedicated NPR reporter demonstrates size of pure platinum coin (photo shows simulation, not authentic coin).

And another point to be made here is that what this coin is really intended to address is not so much the deficit qua the deficit, but the debt ceiling. See, the Republicans forgot to cave on the debt ceiling while they were caving on everything else last week, and the White House forgot to insist on it—so the debt ceiling, which prohibits spending over a previously specified level, must be raised to accommodate Obama’s continued spending on welfare, bailouts of the solar-panel industry, subsidization of Acorn, Planned Parenthood, properly subversive Banks, the Obamas’ serial vacation junkets, PBS, NPR, and the wind power and Tofu industries. So printing the magic coin would simply give the government “a way forward,” or in this case “upward” through the debt ceiling and would bypass Congress. The debt ceiling could more or less “be deemed” to have been raised, spending could continue at its present, insane pace, and the lapdog media could chant incessantly that it was all the result of Republican intransigence. In a fantasy world of lemon-drop trees and big rock-candy mountains, everything would be okay again. No recovery, really, no economy to speak of, no free enterprise, no small business, but continued spending as far as the eye can see–  but this is all too laughably immature to really happen, right?  No American administration would be dumb enough to rub that lamp, right? Wrong again, America! Take Josh Barro over at the Bloomberg View who professed indignation at the skepticism of various Republican legislators. Sure, Barro admitted, the idea of creating a wonder coin is “silly/zany/juvenile,” but he added, “Republican intransigence over the debt ceiling is juvenile. There is no particular reason that the president should not use a juvenile strategy in response.” Welll…actually, Josh, there is—but that’s not important now. Anyway, WOOF is working on securing Barro’s home address so our readers can go over and toilet roll his house and ring his doorbell a lot if the coin idea goes through. It may seem silly, zany, and immature, Josh —but you started it, you big dork!

So what could possibly go wrong with this idea? (The coin idea that is, not toilet rolling Josh’s house.) Why not print up a magic coin that allows spending to continue—and why not print up a bunch of them, or one great big super one, and we can all get millions of dollars from the government and be happy forever?  Well, because in the real world, WOOFketeers, when our nation makes a mockery of its own laws, as well as all the standard rules of economics, it loses credibility. The currency is devalued, our debt is demanded due from abroad, our credit rating (which used to matter to us) goes even further into the toilet, and if subsection 31 USC 5112 (the law in question) can be warped into allowing this phantasmagorical “solution” to our problems, we are collectively living in La-La Land and we can all book tickets for the happy cruise on the Good Ship Lollypop. What conceivable budgetary discussion could ever be conducted again with any air of seriousness or maturity? What conceivable standard of valuation could ever again be plausibly applied to our currency? We would have the opposite of a currency secured by gold—we would have a currency secured by the fantasies of a childish president, his childish economists, and his childish supporters in the Senate, House, and media. Keynesianism on steroids? No, this is Keynesianism on LSD.

John Maynard Keynes–Care for some socialism with your electric kool-aid?

Advocates of the magic coin are all over the Internet insisting that there is no way its creation could conceivably cause inflation. Are they on crack?  Besides the fact that the Fed is not even constitutionally permitted to issue currency, and the fact that such an issuance would shred the separation of powers, the creation of a trillion dollars with no perceptible backing of any substantive nature, whether issued illegally by the Federal Reserve or injudiciously by the Treasury would precurse massive inflation. Manufacturing such a coin, no matter how dissembled semantically, would be equivalent to making money out of thin air, so that the laws of supply and demand would take a decisively violent swing in the excruciatingly obvious direction of

The Ship of State, bound for the big rock candy ice berg?

the debasement of the American dollar. The argument that runaway inflation will not ensue is based on the fact that the magic coin won’t be in circulation—but this is a ridiculous argument. Liberals have spent decades trying to argue against monetarism by pointing out that currency issuance is increasingly pointless as a touchstone for inflation in a credit-based, electronically manipulated economy—so now all of a sudden we’ll be okay with insanely expanded assets if we don’t try to get change for the coin down at the 7/11? Then there is the argument that inflation won’t ensue because the Federal Reserve will offset the impact of the trillion dollar infusion by selling off trillions in Treasury securities it has on hand. Your ten year old, provided you have one, can tell you why that plan is self-defeating. And that’s assuming the Fed elects to do anything at all. The funniest line WOOF has read in the inflation debate is from a FORBES contributor (et tu, Forbes?) who takes comfort in the knowledge that all will be well, “as long as the Fed does its job…”  and if that supposition seems sanguine in the extreme, consider the country’s emotional condition once the idea of “Obama’s stash” no longer belongs to the febrile imaginings of a nutty Detroit welfare lady, but exists in actuality, infinitely expandable, infinitely convenient, infinitely available. NO more paying taxes. No more National Debt. No more working. No more competition for wealth. And if you really want to scare yourself, take a look at the web, fellow patriots, and get a load of how widely, almost uniformly, bloggers, economists, and all the paid and unpaid amplifiers of Liberal opinion are supportive of this magic bullet—and damnatory of those stupid Republicans who won’t do what the President wants!

They may be stupid, but at least they didn’t think this up!

So WOOF, assuming that this insanity may well result in the issuance of the coin, and assuming that Congress, having been robbed of its constitutional role of issuing currency may nevertheless retain its role of determining who goes onto the currency issued, has gotten into the spirit of things and submitted a design for the platinum goose egg that will save us all [at top]. What do you think, fellow WOOFians? What do you think, Congress? C’mon, it exactly captures the spirit of the epoch! Oh, and we can’t close here without telling you something else. Do you know who ramrodded these laws through that are now being massaged into permitting the Great Platinum Bank Deposit? None other than Rep. Mike Castle, (R-Del). Ring a bell? Yes, Castle was the RINO who was resoundingly defeated in the 2010 Republican primary by the magnificently brilliant and beautiful Christine O’Donnell, (WOOF’s nominee for the presidency in 2012) and who would also have defeated her revoltingly inadequate opponent in the general election and saved us from all this by now, if only there weren’t so many stupid voters in Delaware! But what do you expect from a state that proudly sent Joe Biden to the Senate term after term? But we digress. Get ready for the Obama Bank Job, America! It may not be long now, and we’ll all be cashing in for keeps!

O’Donnell beat Castle but lost to Coons (the bald creep on the right) in the general election–a dark day for the Republic, not to mention aesthetics!

WOOF GREETS 2013 WITH FISCAL CLIFF SPECIAL, MUSIC BY THE GOLDWATERS: BOLD PREDICTIONS OF TWENTY EVENTS THAT WILL NOT OCCUR!

You can’t actually hear them, but they weren’t all that good  anyhow, so IMAGINE how good they’d sound if they were playing, and they were a whole lot better than they ever were!

Welcome to WOOF’s New Year’s Festival and Threat Appraisal for 2013! We wanted to start off by acknowledging that that death of Dick Clark in 2012, while lamentable, did not turn out to presage the non-occurrence of the new year, as some had feared. So that reminded us that we should start off with some good solid music, and for that we suggest you just close your eyes (after you’ve read this, of course) and imagine that you are listening to the tuneful conservatism of the GOLDWATERS, that hip, touring hootenanny-style folk group that formed to support the candidacy of Barry Goldwater back in 1964, and recorded one LP. We didn’t link to their music because we’re too paranoid, but you can go to other websites and listen to them. We actually haven’t—the idea of them is good enough for us. Some websites call them “unlistenable,” but we say, so what? So what if the right had its own version of the Holy Modal Rounders? And they take us back to the good old days of Goldwaterism when it was solidly Goldwateristic. You know, before Barry became what George Will once politely called “increasingly mercurial.” Whenever we get a little bitter about the failure of our candidate, Christine O’Donnell, to capture the White House last November, we just remind ourselves of what it was like back in ’64 when Barry got clobbered, and we feel strangely better. So, now that we’ve cleared all that….what else does 2013 have in store?

Nancy Ling Perry–from Goldwater Girl to SLA terrorist, killed in FBI shootout–what made you do it, Nancy?

Apostrophe to the 4th wall: Why did so many Goldwater Girls go so wrong, by the way? A rhetorical question, admittedly, but worthy of some thought, nonetheless! We could actually array quite an assemblage here of once radiant young ladies who proudly wore the cowboy hat and boots of a daughter of the Conservative Revolution, but then broke bad. Suffice it for our immediate purposes that we show you two such cases–and omit Karl Hess from the discussion, because he was never exactly, well–he was a guy.

Hillary Clinton–from Goldwater girl to Bill Clinton defender to Benghazi –how did it go so wrong?

DID WE GO OVER THE CLIFF YET—OR ARE SENATORS CHRONONAUTS?

Why on earth would President Obama want to avoid the fiscal cliff? He needn’t fear any unwanted restrictions that the cliff might impose, because he’ll ignore them, just as he ignores federal court orders and the constitutional mandate to submit yearly budgets. Nobody will do anything. Besides, on December 31, the first noticeable effect of the “cliff” will be the disappearance of the Bush tax cuts, and Obama hates the Bush tax cuts. He only extended them briefly to help the economy long enough to help himself gain re-election. He doesn’t need them now, so out they’ll go. He can then claim that Republicans made the tax hikes happen, even though he could easily propose tax reductions for the middle class of his own invention, he won’t. He wants the middle class taxed into oblivion. Then comes the second wave of the assault when on January 1st the average American household will be hit by the alternative minimum tax which is estimated to raise taxes for many Americans by as much as $3,700. Again, Obama could not be happier—he doesn’t need to get re-elected, which is why he’s no longer worried about the already over-extended unemployment benefits crashing to a halt…although we bet the RINOS will extend those one way or another…you know, just to be likable.  And from the point of view of the Great Helmsman, it would be nice to have as many people as possible on the doles to keep them voting Democrat, although with his own regal duff firmly on the throne, Obama is not the type to go fretting unduly about all the little people.

Also on January 1^st (otherwise known as right now) comes “the sequester” which is a euphemism for immediate, drastic reductions in government spending. Sound like a

Hot mic accidentally picks up Our Beloved Helmsman telling Medvedev to tell Putin he can disarm U.S. better after re-election.

conservative’s dream? Not when you consider that this includes a 55 billion dollar slash to defense spending! Obama is anxious to make good on his promise to Vladimir Putin via Medvedev (accidentally picked up by a live microphone, if you recall) to work harder to disarm America following his re-election because he’d have “more flexibility.” Cuts to Medicare will simply point up the need for National Healthcare!

What people can’t understand because people don’t get how crazy congress is, is that the law mandating “sequester” was never supposed to be put into effect—like the doomsday device in Dr. Strangelove. The idea had been to create legislation that would produce spending cuts so horrendous from any sane point of view that the mere existence of the law would force reasonable negotiation and an acceptable raising of the debt ceiling. But nobody foresaw Barrack Obama, the first Martian president! (See Science and the Paranormal forum for the full story.) From Obama’s point of view, this all looks like a pretty good way to reduce the American Republic to cinders while the lapdog media establishment blames—who? Boehner, probably. The Bush thing is getting kind of retro. And Boehner has already proved himself a suitable chump, doggedly playing Charlie Brown to Obama’s Lucy, always willing to take another run at the ball no matter how many times Lucy gleefully jerks it away at the last second! Yes, the New Year will send us careening over the fiscal cliff, unless Boehner caves in enough ways in enough time to save— Obama. (And it appears as of this posting that he and the other Republicans have caved as anticipated, but the year is young, so let’s see how things sort themselves out!)

“Yes, but the whole point of the doomsday machine is that you never have to use it!”

Let’s also bear in mind, there really is no Obama plan, except to raise taxes. Taxing the wealthy may play well among the mindless “Occupy” yawps, but will only hurt the economy while providing very little of the imagined revenue. We say ‘imagined’ because liberals and RINOs both believe that when they tax more they get more revenue. They still don’t understand the Laffer Curve. Jack Kennedy did, (even before Art Laffer sketched it on that famous cocktail napkin—but JFK may have been a chrononaut).

You don’t increase revenue by raising taxes! Got that? Repeat it a couple of times!

Reagan understood the Laffer curve, and yes, “W” did too. But they don’t. The lost lambs in the Senate are clueless about the physics of taxation. Tax people more and they fork over more revenue is the way most RINOs and all Democrats think. It never works, and tax cuts always work, so of course, we’re still going with higher taxes! And gentle reader, if you are scratching your head wondering how lowering taxes can equal more revenue, and if this is the first you’ve heard of this, we aren’t upset. We know how difficult the counter intuitive is to grasp—and how hopelessly propagandized you’ve been by the Socialist Media Cabal—but it’s New Years and we don’t have time to explain right now. Read “The Supply Side Revolution” by Paul Craig Roberts—and say, don’t read too much other stuff by him without us there to explain his weird side, okay? But the economic stuff definitely rocks.

In view of the deal finally (seemingly) struck at (or immediately following) the last moment by congress and the White House, which initially turned out briefly not to have been struck after all because our Beloved Helmsman suddenly announced that he wanted the tax cuts suspended, spooking the ever spookable Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) into withdrawing from the victory lap, we are engaging in this reprise of current and probable future events—reprised as though they were past events. Don’t think about that part too hard.

All right then–Obama’s noon-time press conference of December 31st (where he surrounded himself with carefully selected members of the middle class, direct from central

At least they weren’t wearing lab coats! The Beloved Helmsman and his middle class players–but the deal didn’t show up in time for the production number!

casting, intended to breathe relief on cue over the deal struck with congress), turned out to be pointless because there was no deal to announce. Undaunted, Obama announced that there probably would be a deal. And there almost was, (that would be deal number two of yesterday) but then once again there wasn’t, because it fell through again, see? But the Senate thinks it can time travel and reach a deal today, January 1^st, that will cancel out yesterday, and make yesterday today. See? And such a deal would magically obviate the fiscal cliff, which WOOF pointed out last week was actually overshot several months ago, but which can be retrieved possibly, with swift action in the future. See?

Are some Senators Time Lords?

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SO WHERE ARE WE AT THIS EXACT MOMENT?

The Great Helmsman and congressional lawmakers claim they have reached a deal, too late of course, but apparently just in time! In a way, we are relieved to learn this, because it means that our beloved futurologist, Dr. Gootensteiner Johannes Walters, was correct in his prediction that Republicans would ultimately cave in and effectuate a bargain with the Regime.

The agreement, which includes spending cuts (which will never occur, of course) and revenue increases, (which means higher taxes, but nobody likes saying that) “extends tax cuts on incomes up to $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for couples.” Of course, you can’t really extend a cut, you can only extend what already is—so there is no cut. Taxes will not go higher in this income range. Those earning above that, however, will be taxed at a rate of 39.6 percent, up from 35 percent. WOOF wonders how long the parties haggled before settling on 39.6 percent! Why not, you know, call it 40 percent? A poison pill for the U.S. Economy!  But that’s okay, because jobless benefits will be extended for another year. That’s right. As predicted in these pages!  Now, as for the spending cuts that will never happen so it’s absolutely ludicrous to discuss them, but here we go anyway, are you ready? Okay—fifty percent of those spending cuts, were they ever actually to manifest, must come from non-defense areas. Because you are clever, dear readers, you have probably therefore concluded, as we have also, that the other fifty percent will come out of defense, which is insane. We also predict that if any cuts ever actually happen, they will come wholly out of the defense budget. After all, Our Beloved Helmsman promised Vladimir Putin to slash our defense, and apparently there is honor among Commissars.

Chucky Schumer (D- New York), of the Senate Democratic leadership, took time out from test firing Tec-9s at his favorite shooting range to assure reporters that the Senate would pass the newly struck deal by “a midnight deadline,” which “deadline” was news to everybody, the deadline having passed prior to the announcement of the deadline that isn’t here yet. Got it? But we predict this deadline will nonetheless be honored by the Senate because when it comes to raising taxes, Chuckie Schumer knows whereof he speaks!

So what about the House where those darn Tea-Party types give House Speaker John Boehner so much trouble? Well, that’s an ugly business  just ask any moderate GOP strategist!  Majority Leader Boehner issued a statement following the announcement of the Senate deal to the effect that: “The House will honor its commitment to consider the Senate agreement if it is passed. Decisions about whether the House will seek to accept or promptly amend the measure will not be made until House members — and the American people — have been able to review the legislation.”

What that means is that Honest John will try his best to ram this through, but some knuckle-dragging ultra-conservative fanatics may prove something of an embarrassment to him, and all right thinking Republicans–namely, the ones whose thinking isn’t all that far right!

We just like this shot of Ann, obviously less than thrilled by the great compromise– hers of course being the neolithic face of knuckle-dragging, insensate ultra-conservatism –save us, John Boehner!

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IMPORTANT EVENTS THAT ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT HAPPEN!

As all true WOOFketeers will recall, in early December, our very own futurologist Dr. Gootensteiner Johannes Walters  predicted the Republicans would cave on tax hikes and raise the debt ceiling in exchange for imaginary budget cuts–thus you read it here first, gentle readers–weeks in advance of it actually happening! Heady with success, we asked Dr. Walters to look into the Akashic record again–but this time, just to make it really hard for him, we asked him to predict what will NOT happen in the year 2013. He rose to the challenge, fellow patriots! And so, all the way from beautiful downtown Zug Switzerland, by the azure placidity of lovely Lake Zug in the beautiful Canton of Zug, we have Dr. Walters’s fearless predictions of 20 events that will NOT take place in the coming year! To wit:

• Iran’s development of nuclear capability is stopped by a joint American/Israeli strike.
• Janice Rogers Brown is nominated by President Obama for the Supreme Court.
• Rush Limbaugh is invited to give the commencement address at Harvard.
• A Federal Court cites Obama with contempt for ignoring a court order.
• A fence is built dividing the United Sates and Mexico.
• President Obama makes good on his four-year-old pledge to balance the budget.
• A liberal Supreme Court Justice astonishes court-watchers by shifting to the right philosophically and voting with the Court’s conservative justices more often than not.
• Joe McCarthy is awarded the Medal of Freedom posthumously.
• The United States Air Force admits that UFOs are real, adding that it isn’t sure what they are or where they come from and pointing out that in any case there is definitely nothing it can do about them.
• Somebody recalls growing up in Hawaii with Barrack Obama.
• Cass Sunstein writes a tell-all book trashing the Administration and accusing the President of being a communist.
• Fidel Castro actually dies.
• Mohammed Morsi joins the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and calls on his countrymen to do likewise.
• John Stewart makes fun of somebody to the left of Gerald Ford.
• Vladimir Putin steps down from public life voluntarily, says he needs more time with family.
• Hugo Chavez endows a chair at the Regent University School of Government.
• The RNC releases a statement acknowledging the fact that its failure to fearlessly embrace a right wing conservative agenda is the reason it keeps running moderates and getting beaten.
• Arianna Huffington snaps out of a two-decade case of clinical fugue and remembers that she’s a right winger.
• Barrack Obama releases his grades and college thesis for everyone’s perusal.
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad flies to Tel Aviv to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu, saying “I have come here to renounce my past.”

(And finally):

• Mankind enters a new age of peace and serenity as part of a vast harmonic convergence beginning in January of 2013…oh, and Recovery Summer Five turns out to entail evidence of an actual economic recovery–that’s really two predictions, but Dr. Walters is generous by nature!

So now that you know what definitely will NOT happen in the next 12 months, enjoy the NEW YEAR, fellow WOOFians–and say, why not spend 2013 right here with us–we’ll be here for you right up until that NET NEUTRALITY thing passes and we all wind up in FEMA camps together. Until then– edification to our friends, confusion to our enemies, and hey, let’s make this the year we find out, “Who promoted Peress!”

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REPUBLICAN LUMINARIES LEND CREDIBILITY TO WOOF FORECAST!

Paul to protest GOP cave-in based on WOOF prediction!

Dear WOOF readers, are we not true to our pledge to bring you the finest in up-to-the-moment news reporting—even including the news that has not yet even happened? Some readers voiced skepticism yesterday morning when WOOF’s own Dr. Gootensteiner Johannes Walters employed his unique ability to read the occult Akashic record and wrote a well informed article for us on how the Republicans on the Hill will cave into the Totalitarian Socialist Media’s demand that the President’s plan to raise taxes and the debt ceiling be aided and abetted by a compliant Republican party in both houses! Some of you scoffed, upbraiding us for our incautious journalism, our willingness

Tea Party, alerted by WOOF, takes stand against shaky GOP!

to link the honorable name of WOOF to a reportorial style some of you branded “speculative,” “tentative at best,” and in one instance, “crackpot stuff!”  Well, apparently Dr. Walters is well enough respected by SOME parties on the Hill!  Yes, according to an article appearing this morning at Breitbart News, (http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/12/10/Rand-Paul-Paul-Broun-others-to-join-tea-party-group-in-bashing-House-GOP-leadership-on-taxes-this-week) Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and Congressman Paul Brown (R-Georgia) “will join [a] Tea Party group…to denounce the House leadership’s caving on taxes later this week” adding that an event scheduled with Paul and Brown for Wednesday this week at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., “will focus on opposing the GOP  ‘surrender’ to new taxes.” Looks like you have readers in high places, Dr. Walters! All kudos to you sir, and to Messrs. Paul and Brown who clearly see the future as well! WOOF, for its part, pledges that it will proudly continue to report news that has not yet actually happened whenever circumstances permit, and the gathering tyrannies of socialist despotism demand that we do so! We’ll be here for you, gentle readers! And Dr. Walters will be too! Well—he’ll be in Zug Switzerland—but you know what we mean! 

REPUBLICANS CAVE ON TAXES; HIKE DEBT CEILING! Read the inevitable here first!

Fiscal Cliff well behind us, author claims!

REPUBLICANS AGREE TO RAISE CEILING ON DEBT, LOWER BOOM ON TAXPAYERS!

Why wait until later for news of the inevitable? Armed with our special correspondent’s uncanny ability to read the Akashic record, about which the less said the better, WOOF has decided to scoop all other available news sources in an unprecedented service to its loyal readership (except for the time we reported the Detroit Tigers would not win the World Series a week before they officially didn’t) by reporting the future before it actually happens, not that it won’t, because it will! So here’s the hottest flash of the hour, ripped from the headlines of tomorrow, courtesy of WOOF’s very own futurologist, Dr. Gootensteiner Johannes Walter, former occult and astrophysical adviser to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and more recently, spiritual adviser to the late renowned author, Mickey Spillane. While WOOF’s crack paralegal department has advised us that we must outwardly dissociate ourselves from any official endorsement of Dr. Walters’s forecasted findings, it goes without saying that while “Dr. Walters’s views may not necessarily reflect the views of either WOOF, the secret organization, or it’s cyberspacial subsidiary publication here represented,” we know for a fact that everything the man says is totally for real. So here he is:  Dr. G.J. Walter, with the skinny on what treacheries shall come!

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Flash! Conservative columnists and  radio talk-show hosts voiced unanimous outrage tomorrow, as the stalwarts of Republican party resistance, who stood for weeks like the little Dutch boy at the dyke in the face of Obama-care’s tidal surge, caved in completely, withdrawing their allegorical

Michelle Bachmann would never raise your taxes!

finger from the metaphoric crack and allowing the Democratically controlled Senate to raise the debt ceiling to new, obscene heights while simultaneously permitting themselves to be engulfed in a mammoth wave of higher taxes, including taxation of the wealthy, and numerous Obama-care-related economic and anti-Constitutional travesties too horrendous to contemplate!  A majority of skittish Republicans in both houses of congress, led by men like Bob Corker (R-Tenn), broke ranks with the conservative movement allowing debt ceiling hikes and higher taxes to sweep over them like those big waves crashing over those Irish people on that beach in that Robert Mitchum film about Ryan’s Daughter!  Remember that film? David Lean put Chris Jones in it, which was a guts move at the time—but anyway, a Republican spokesperson speaking on condition of anonymity will soon tell this author, “In a way, it was a tremendous relief! Boehner’s a great guy, and every day he’d get all tearful asking anybody who’d listen, ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I refusing to raise revenues and the debt ceiling? I don’t get it!’ and you know, none of us had a good answer for him. We lost two elections now because a bunch of right-wing lunatics who listen to the haters and the homophobes on the radio and can’t even get themselves on Meet the Press have been running the party off the road into a big ultra-right-wing ditch—and you know who I mean–guys like that Tucker Carlson guy, and whatsername—Rita? Gretel? The one on FOX, right? Who does all the murder stories—or do I mean her? Or is that the one called Laurie?—anyhow, for gosh sakes, it’s time we got back to our moderate roots and did what the President wants—and maybe it won’t even work, but at least we’ll be invited back to the better inside-the-beltway social dos and they’ll be smiling at us over the quiche lorraine again! I mean the way Brian Williams has been slurring kind of like Brokaw used to, and rolling his eyes when he talks about us—we can’t take much more of this—people have to understand; it’s just been very, very brutal!”

Harry Reid will lead the Senate drive to raise your taxes!

In related events to come, Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) who earlier in the week signaled his willingness to cave in completely to President Obama’s socialist agenda

No way would Christine O’Donnell ever raise your taxes!

by stating flatly that no Republican wanted to vote for a tax increase, will agree shortly to vote for a tax increase and help deliver the Senate into Obama’s corner, even as one of Coburn’s aids will shortly tell this reporter that, “It was always Boehner in the House who was crucial—John has a real bunch of crazies on his hands over there, and his life has been hell, trying to get Obama to negotiate with him when the President just laughs at him, and trying to get the lunatic fringe in his own party to understand that the only way to spend more is by increasing the debt ceiling so we can get the Democrats to agree to spending cuts that we all know will never happen anyway! John has been trying to get the President to agree to concessions, and even though it’s totally obvious he’d just be conceding things that have nothing to do with reality, the President has refused to even give up the unreal stuff even though he knows we don’t really expect him to follow up on any of it—and that’s just bad faith! And then, John’s name—he can’t get anybody to pronounce it correctly,” the source will go on to elaborate, “Everybody can say ‘Obama’ but nobody can say ‘Boehner,’ it’s just been hard on the man!”

Cole will cave on taxes in near future!

“We voted to build the fence between us and Mexico,” a spokesperson for Senator Susan Collins, (R-Maine) will shortly declare, adding, “Did we ever build a fence? Of course not! Does the president seriously think if he gives up a few concessions here, anybody’s going to remember it after we brag about it a little on Face the Nation? But the simple fact is, we’re broke, so we need to raise taxes to raise revenues—any school kid in Maine could tell you that!” An anonymous spokesperson for lame duck Olympia Snowe, (R-Maine), well known liberal Republican and Siamese twin of Senator Collins, added, “Those of us in the rational middle on this are ready to sell out completely if we can just get those tea-party Neanderthals off our backs—frankly, the President won a great victory in November, and we owe it to him to spend all he wants while taking the necessary steps to make the Fiscal Cliff look like it’s farther away than it probably is, but it needs to be seen as being farther down the road to get voters to see its important to raise the tax dollars to avoid going off it, and to postpone going off it until some of us are out of this town, like Senator Snowe! Or even that nut DeMint—he may be going to that Heritage Foundation hate tank, but at least he’ll be out of here!”

Lastly, spokespeople for Tom Cole, (R-Okla.) will speak to this reporter on condition of anonymity and on condition that their boss be identified as a

Snowe won’t go– without raising taxes and debt limit!

different person from Tom Coburn (mentioned above), also R-Okla, but a Senator, not a congressman, whereas Cole is a congressman, not a Senator, which is admittedly very confusing, especially since both Republicans will cave on taxation at exactly the same moment making differentiation even more difficult. “We need to remember that there’s more at stake here than just some yappity Mormon nutcase on the radio selling gold and all his whacked out books and that Rush guy who doesn’t even write any—we need to remember that this is a serious town politically, and if we can’t go on Liberal Democratic TV shows like Good Morning America and have mainstream Democrat anchor people like George Stephanopoulos treat us semi-decently, we can’t be counted upon to negotiate compromises for the American People—bottom line!” 

Sarah Palin would never raise your taxes!

So that’s the news of the future today, WOOF readers, provided to you at no expense, (until the forthcoming Internet web taxes are negotiated in Washington, by the way) except to WOOF,  of course, which paid me a modest stipend for my Akashic-record-reading abilities. Yes, the Republicans will cave on taxes, yes they will raise tax rates to the wealthy, yes they will raise the debt ceiling, and yes they will tell you, while they raise the debt ceiling, that they did it to cut spending! Is there a fiscal cliff? Yes, America! We drove off it about two years ago, but the Socialist Totalitarian media refused to tell you! And as your in-house WOOF futurologist let me assure you, there is no flying car coming from Obama Motors! So happy landings, and until next time, this is Dr. Gootensteiner Johannes Walter saying good luck, friends!  –GJW (Zug, Switzerland)

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As always, the editors here at WOOF wish to thank Dr. Walters for his always gimlet and Cassandra-esque reportage—a level of journalism unattainable for most in the business because where Dr. Walters is concerned, foresight is 20/20!