Dick Morris - Screwed!: How China, Russia, the EU, and Other Foreign Countries Screw the United States, How Our Own Leaders Help Them Do It . . . and What We Can Do About It

SCREWED!

How Foreign Countries
Are Ripping America
Off and Plundering Our
Economyand How Our
Leaders Help Them Do It

DICK MORRIS
and EILEEN MCGANN

To Eugene J. Morris (19102010),
an inspiration to us both... still

Contents

DICK GEPHARDT, POPULIST CRUSADER...
UNTIL HE GETS PAID OFF

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Just before the Chinese President was to arrive in the U.S., a radio show host asked me what I would say to him if I were President. I said I would have told him to stay home. Dont come here until you stop screwing us.

Donald Trump, January 2011

America is being ripped off.

And our own leaders are not just complicit, theyre actively assisting in the process.

A newly fashionable dogma of globalismenthusiastic support for an economic and cultural view of the world as onehas supplanted a fundamental concern for the interests and needs of American citizens in the priorities of our national government. Instead, more and more, we are encouraged by the political and corporate power elite to view ourselves as citizens of the world, where international committees, not individual nations, make the rules that we must follow.

As if pride in our own country and a desire to maintain our democratic institutions is just some kind of knee-jerk nationalism by out of touch, embittered, old-fashioned, and cranky people.

This planetary imperative, inculcated in top schools and advocated by the bureaucratic elite, routinely supersedes our own domestic needs and led to one economic catastrophe after another, and, unfortunately, more are coming.

The fact is that we are increasingly ruled by an incestuous and institutionalized worldwide liberal bureaucracy. These so-called experts, who have led us off the cliff in the first decade of the twenty-first century, continue to command our obedience. And our elected officials wont defy them or even think for themselves.

In the globalist community, democracy is utterly unfashionable. These elites see voters as annoying masses who are simply too stupid to know what is really good for the world. Their contempt extends to our leaders: They view legitimately elected officials as dangerous demagogues exploiting their voters credulity. They believe, instead, that career experts like themselves, trained at the top academies, weaned on Wall Street, and institutionalized in the bowels of government bureaus, are destined to rule the new world, telling us what to do, how to live, and dictating what we earn.

Everywhere we see the wreckage of their decisions. We see it in the rusting hulks of their favored banks and companies, the metastasizing cancer of personal bankruptcies filed by ordinary American families, and the flawed consequences of their misbegotten policies. As Talleyrand once said to the Bourbon kings of France, they learn nothing and forget nothing and constantly proffer the same discredited solutions.

And our own leaders wont stand up for our interests. Hypnotized by the beat of globalism, they throw away our prosperity, drive our own companies into insolvency, and strangle us with regulations and taxes to our competitive disadvantage.

Meanwhile, other nations focus only on their own self-interest. They laugh as our environmental regulations and labor laws put our own companies out of business and yield the playing field to them. They chant anti-American slogans and fund terrorists while raking in our foreign aid.

Whats wrong with this picture?

Global institutions encroach on our national sovereignty, usurping decisions about our own economy, energy, environment, land, and businesses. When Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia drill off Florida shores while our own government wont grant US companies permits, we see a microcosm of what afflicts us.

Its time to stop this and reclaim our democracy, own sovereignty, and our common sense.

Because foreign countries and companies are exploiting us, right on our own soil. Many foreign countries wantand getsomething concrete from us. In order to get what they want, more and more foreign governments are hiring influential lobbyists, usually former top bureaucrats or members of Congress, to shape American policy and American aid in their own particular interest. In 2009 and 2010, for example, foreign entities spent $487 and $460 million, respectively, on trying to influence Congress and the Obama administration and use the media to propagandize their point of view!

Even the late Muammar Gaddafi had a seat at the table, hiring a former Congressional leader to do his bidding.

Its no wonder that our foreign policies are so dysfunctional. In many cases, they are developed with the input of our enemies!

Its time to change the way things are done in Washington.

For at least the last sixty years, elite technocrats have determined our national and international policies. They shuttle between government and academia, reveling in their shared assumptions and priorities, but never consulting us or caring much about what we think. Their elitist self-absorption has created a vast disconnect between the agenda of those who determine and administer our foreign policy and our collective national values.

This disconnect has led a majority of American voters into the grip of pessimism and despair, animated by a conviction that our nation has passed its peak.

A July 2011 poll conducted for The Hill found that 37 percent of likely voters believe Americas best days are over and 62 percent think that we are being overtaken by other countries in important ways.

This pessimistic view was prevalent in the views of a majority of voters in both major parties, as well as independent voters:

PERCENTAGE OF LIKELY VOTERS BY PARTY IDENTIFICATION THAT BELIEVE OTHER COUNTRIES ARE OVERTAKING THE US:

Republicans: 70%

Independents: 63%

Democrats: 52%

And America is no longer universally considered the strongest economy in the world. A February 2011 Gallup poll found that, for the first time, 52 percent of Americans identified China, not the United States, as the leading economic power in the world today.

The lingering recession and economic uncertainty have contributed to a widespread and growing crisis of confidence in the American government. All across the United States, people in different walks of life no longer now believe that the federal government is developing and enacting national policies in their interest. In fact, in a July 28, 2011, poll conducted for The Hill , a majority of the respondents indicated that they believed that political decisions on the federal level actually have a negative effect on their lives. This is a startling repudiation of the traditional long-standing covenant between the voters and the government and underscores the need for radical change.