Chairman’s Report from Washington, DC for August 11, 2011

THE PRESIDENT, WAR, TERROR AND ISLAM

THE DEBT CEILING AND TERROR – President Obama, Democrats in the Congress and liberal newscasters virtually never use the word “terrorist.” When Nidal Hasan murdered 13 of his fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood while shouting Allah Akbar, they said it was because he was “troubled.” However, during the debt ceiling debate, Vice President Biden and numerous members of Congress continually referred to “Tea Party Republicans” as “terrorists.” Obama went so far as to say that they “held a gun to the head of America.” Meanwhile the Obama Administration continues to deal directly with the Muslim Brotherhood, referring to those Islamic supremacists as “reformers.”

Perhaps Vice President Biden needs an extra layer of protection from these “Tea Party terrorists” and that is why he is renting a property he owns to the Secret Service agents who protect his life. The Washington Times reported that Biden so far has charged the Secret Service more than $13,000 just this year. Under a contract, the Secret Service will pay the Vice President a total of $66,000 by the end of 2013. The property in question is a cottage next to his waterfront home outside Wilmington, Delaware. Vice President Biden is a multi-millionaire, but he just can’t help squeezing a few more bucks out of the taxpayers to line his own pockets.

DEBT NOW 100% OF GDP – President Obama demanded and got lots more borrowed money to spend. Now, as a result of the debt ceiling increase signed into law by the President, the United States has joined a handful of nations whose debt is greater than their entire yearly economic output. The club of nations owing 100% or more of GDP the USA now belongs to includes: Japan (229 percent), Greece (152 percent), Jamaica (137 percent), Lebanon (134 percent), Italy (120 percent), Ireland (114 percent) and Iceland (103 percent), according to the International Monetary Fund.

 IN DEBT? FIND TIME TO PARTY – On Wednesday, August 3rd, President Obama  celebrated his 50^th birthday eve with a ride on Air Force One to Chicago where his birthday party was held in a room that rents for $44,000 a night plus food and beverages. Guests had to pay about $38,500 each to attend the main event and even more for another get-together after the main party. Overall the average paid was well over $45,000 per person, which is thousands of dollars more than the average American earns in a year. Many of the wealthy liberals who attended arrived in private corporate jets.

One present that President Obama did not count on was a downgrade of U.S. debt from AAA to AA+. He received the news in a draft note from S&P on Air Force One on his way back from his birthday extravaganza. Obama, like most of those in the Congress apparently did not understand during the entire debt ceiling negotiations that a possible downgrade would occur if serious debt reduction was not addressed.  President Obama and his liberal ally Senator Harry Reid thought that raising the limit of borrowing was all that was needed to avoid a downgrade.

THE CONGRESS ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND TERROR

THE DEBT CEILING INCREASE – In my capacity as the chairman of Government Is Not God, a political action committee, I issued the following statement when the debt limit increase was passed by the Congress:

 Voltaire: “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien”. (The perfect is the enemy of the good) We are seeking a perfect solution to a situation that is beyond repair. At this point, if the government drastically reduces spending, the nation will spiral into depression. If the government continues to borrow at the current rate, the nation will go bankrupt. The “perfect” Tea Party solution crashes the economy. The “perfect” liberal solution crushes America under debt and eventually causes insolvency. Unfortunately, nothing in the middle works either as long as it is government action of some sort. The only solution is the natural one, which involves decline and reconstruction. Regrettably, the rebirth of a chronic debtor nation economically can take decades.

FED SPENDING NOW OVER $30K PER HOUSEHOLD – The federal government is spending more per household than ever before. Since 1965, government spending per household has grown by nearly 162% — from $11,431 in 1965 to $29,401 in 2010. From 2010 to 2021, it is projected to rise to $35,773, a 22% increase. While a debt ceiling framework passed the House this week,  Congressman Randy Forbes said, “We have a lot of work to do to help America dig out of our fiscal sinkhole, including pursuing entitlement reform and passing a Balanced Budget Amendment.” Forbes voted against the bill raising the debt ceiling.

PROTECTING RELIGIOUS MINORITIES – On July 29th, 2011 the House passed bipartisan legislation sponsored by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) to create a special envoy at the U.S. State Department for religious minorities in the Near East and South Central Asia. The legislation was introduced in January in the wake of increasing violence, targeted attacks and heightened discrimination against Christians in Iraq and Egypt, and persistent concerns in Afghanistan and Pakistan, among other nations. The bill was sent to the Senate where it must be approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by John Kerry (MA) and Ranking Member Richard Lugar (IN). Please contact Kerry and Lugar as well as your own Senators and ask that this bill move forward.

FORCE OTHER NATIONS TO BE GAY FRIENDLY – Enslaving women is OK with Democrats; just don’t mistreat gays. In a July late-night session at a marathon committee markup of H.R. 2583, the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Democrat Ranking Member Howard Berman offered an amendment that would have given the Secretary of State a directive to promote the LGBT agenda internationally. Although the amendment was defeated along party lines by Republicans, one question comes to mind: Why was there no reference to the rights of women or religious minorities in the amendment, only to homosexual “rights?” Answer: although homosexuals are a very small minority, they give huge amounts of money to Democrat members of Congress.

CULTURE AND RELIGION

MAYOR BLOOMBERG’S MOSQUE AND SAME-SEX NUPTIALS – Muslims hang homosexuals in Iran and other Islamic nations. Posters have appeared all over London threatening homosexuals. BUT … New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg sees no contradiction in supporting both sodomy and Islam. The mayor not only advocates building a large mosque right at Ground Zero, but he has been photographed kneeling on a prayer rug in another New York City mosque. Yet, as soon as same-sex marriage was legalized in New York he proudly officiated over one of the first gay weddings in New York State, for two of his top aides. (I wonder if these are the guys working to have the mosque built at Ground Zero.) Bloomberg did not go so far as to proclaim them man and wife, but rather declared, “I pronounce you both married,” thus proclaiming the “union” of his top aides, Jonathan Mintz and John Feinblatt.

A NEW VISION FOR GROUND ZERO MOSQUE – The Ground Zero mosque may not be the same mosque that Mayor Bloomberg and city officials rushed to support. They approved a 15 story mega center of Islam at Ground Zero. The developer, a 37 year old former waiter named Sharif El-Gamal, told The New York Times, “We’re going back to basics.” The building, he indicated, may be as small as four stories and may or may not have an actual mosque and that it may or may not be a cultural center. Its new name is “PrayerSpace.”

ATHEISTS SUE OVER GROUND ZERO CROSS – American Atheists filed a lawsuit on July 27^th to stop the display of the Ground Zero Cross stating that, “no other religions or philosophies will be honored.” The cross consists of two intersecting steel beams found intact in the rubble at Ground Zero. It was given a home at the Ground Zero site by the 9/11 Memorial Museum this week. The suit is meritless and a publicity stunt. The 9/11 Memorial Museum is a private non-profit organization with no affiliation with the government.

ANOTHER MUSLIM ATTACK ON FORT HOOD – On July 28th local police, not the military, stopped a Muslim soldier from killing even more service men and women at Ft. Hood. Far from investigating the Muslim soldier, the Army had given him “conscientious objector” status because he said he could not go to Afghanistan to fight Muslim terrorists. A gun shop owner notified the Killeen, Texas police of the Muslim’s purchase of gun powder. Pfc. Naser Abdo, who was AWOL at the time, had weapons and bomb making materials in his motel room near Fort Hood when captured. The military actively recruits Muslims to prove its political correctness. The New York Times, which immediately claimed the bombing in Norway was done by a Christian, has not as yet referred to Abdo as a Muslim, and probably never will.

INTERNATIONAL

Normally the international section of the Chairman’s Report deals with attacks on Christians in Islamic nations, including kidnapping of women for forced marriages and trumped up arrests for blasphemy. However, in this issue I want to share with you the statement I made in July at an event on Capitol Hill which highlighted the persecution of the Falun Gong and other religious minorities in China. Many leaders of groups similar to the Religious Freedom Coalition as well as several congressmen and Senators spoke. Many speakers dealt with the repressive nature of the Chinese Communist Party, but I dealt with the core problem of central planning that has been the source of repression and misery for humanity since the beginning of the 20^th Century. My remarks, “China: The Great Utopia” have since been requested by numerous news outlets and have already been televised worldwide. At World Net Daily and other news outlets it was referred to as “China: The Deadly Utopia.” It is reprinted on the next page

CHINA: THE DEADLY UTOPIA

As an introduction to his second chapter in “The Road to Serfdom,” Friedrich Hayek used a quote by Friedrich Holderlin to sum up collectivism: “What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.”

There are those who see our greatest challenge as the conflict between communist ideology and the free market place or between fascism and democracy, but these are but aspects of the one conflict that humanity faces: reality versus utopianism. During the 20th century, utopian dreams, unfortunately, became reality in the persons of Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Adof Hitler, and Mao Zedong. The result was the “state of hell” referred to by Holderlin. Governments seeking utopia on earth killed tens of millions of human beings in 70-some years of wars, gulags, starvation and mass killings.

While the utopia of Adolf Hitler’s “Thousand- Year Reich” ended in military defeat, and the Soviet “Workers’ Paradise” ended in humiliation for Russia, the dream of a centrally planned utopia lives on in China under the Chinese Communist Party. As in other centrally planned dictatorships, freedom is a casualty in China. Central planning of any kind requires silencing of critics and a control of the press and of speech to insure the continuation of “the plan.” For the level of control needed in China, even the worship of God must be tightly directed. If not, “the plan” could perhaps be undermined, even destroyed by critical voices.

In China today, there is only one political party, the party that is implementing “the plan” for the lives of the Chinese people. Unable to survive using the pure collectivist model of Karl Marx, the Communist Party has “evolved” to a National Socialism model similar to that of Adolf Hitler, using highly controlled free-enterprise sectors to produce the tax base to continue its control.

There is no greater threat to that control than unregulated human faith, the faith represented by the Christian underground churches and the practitioners of Falun Gong. The Chinese Communist Party has used every kind of pressure against the Falun Gong, including arrests, rapes and murders, and even forced abortions on Falun Gong women held in captivity. Recently the Wall Street Journal chronicled the new abuses in China against the evangelical churches there. Utopianism requires a grand plan: a Germany without Jews, a Russia without the rich, a Cambodia without the educated, a caliphate without Christians – or a China without Falun Gong or house-church critics of the Communist Party’s “plan” for the Chinese people.

Twentieth-century utopianism gave the world enough death and destruction to last humanity for 10,000 years. “The Plan” the Chinese Communist Party has for China will fail; it is inevitable. The day of that collapse will mark a new freedom for the repressed. It is the world’s responsibility to give the message to the Chinese Communists that “the plan” is an illusion and that freedom is inevitable regardless of the repression of their own people. The United States government stands on the wrong side of history in backing the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on the Chinese people.

William J. Murray, Chairman

Religious Freedom Coalition, 601 Pennsylvania Ave, NW  #900 , Washington, DC 20004  (202) 742-8990