Requiem for a Dream

The Day America Died

by Paul Craig Roberts

September 30, 2011 was the day America was assassinated.

Some of us have watched this day approach and have warned of its coming, only to be greeted with boos and hisses from "patriots" who have come to regard the US Constitution as a device that coddles criminals and terrorists and gets in the way of the President who needs to act to keep us safe.

In our book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Lawrence Stratton and I showed that long before 9/11 US law had ceased to be a shield of the people and had been turned into a weapon in the hands of the government. The event known as 9/11 was used to raise the executive branch above the law. As long as the President sanctions an illegal act, executive branch employees are no longer accountable to the law that prohibits the illegal act. On the president’s authority, the executive branch can violate US laws against spying on Americans without warrants, indefinite detention, and torture and suffer no consequences.

Many expected President Obama to re-establish the accountability of government to law. Instead, he went further than Bush/Cheney and asserted the unconstitutional power not only to hold American citizens indefinitely in prison without bringing charges, but also to take their lives without convicting them in a court of law. Obama asserts that the US Constitution notwithstanding, he has the authority to assassinate US citizens, who he deems to be a "threat," without due process of law.

In other words, any American citizen who is moved into the threat category has no rights and can be executed without trial or evidence.

On September 30 Obama used this asserted new power of the president and had two American citizens, Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan murdered. Khan was a wacky character associated with Inspire Magazine and does not readily come to mind as a serious threat.

Awlaki was a moderate American Muslim cleric who served as an advisor to the US government after 9/11 on ways to counter Muslim extremism. Awlaki was gradually radicalized by Washington’s use of lies to justify military attacks on Muslim countries. He became a critic of the US government and told Muslims that they did not have to passively accept American aggression and had the right to resist and to fight back. As a result Awlaki was demonized and became a threat.

All we know that Awlaki did was to give sermons critical of Washington’s indiscriminate assaults on Muslim peoples. Washington’s argument is that his sermons might have had an influence on some who are accused of attempting terrorist acts, thus making Awlaki responsible for the attempts.
Obama’s assertion that Awlaki was some kind of high-level Al Qaeda operative is merely an assertion. Jason Ditz concluded that the reason Awlaki was murdered rather than brought to trial is that the US government had no real evidence that Awlaki was an Al Qaeda operative.

Having murdered its critic, the Obama Regime is working hard to posthumously promote Awlaki to a leadership position in Al Qaeda. The presstitutes and the worshippers of America’s First Black President have fallen in line and regurgitated the assertions that Awlaki was a high-level dangerous Al Qaeda terrorist. If Al Qaeda sees value in Awlaki as a martyr, the organization will give credence to these claims. However, so far no one has provided any evidence. Keep in mind that all we know about Awlaki is what Washington claims and that the US has been at war for a decade based on false claims.

But what Awlaki did or might have done is beside the point. The US Constitution requires that even the worst murderer cannot be punished until he is convicted in a court of law. When the American Civil Liberties Union challenged in federal court Obama’s assertion that he had the power to order assassinations of American citizens, the Obama Justice (sic) Department argued that Obama’s decision to have Americans murdered was an executive power beyond the reach of the judiciary.

In a decision that sealed America’s fate, federal district court judge John Bates ignored the Constitution’s requirement that no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law and dismissed the case, saying that it was up to Congress to decide. Obama acted before an appeal could be heard, thus using Judge Bates’ acquiescence to establish the power and advance the transformation of the president into a Caesar that began under George W. Bush.

Before some readers write to declare that Awlaki’s murder is no big deal because the US government has always had people murdered, keep in mind that CIA assassinations were of foreign opponents and were not publicly proclaimed events, much less a claim by the president to be above the law. Indeed, such assassinations were denied, not claimed as legitimate actions of the President of the United States.

Attorneys Glenn Greenwald and Jonathan Turley point out that Awlaki’s assassination terminated the Constitution’s restraint on the power of government. Now the US government not only can seize a US citizen and confine him in prison for the rest of his life without ever presenting evidence and obtaining a conviction, but also can have him shot down in the street or blown up by a drone.

The Ohio National Guardsmen who shot Kent State students as they protested the US invasion of Cambodia in 1970 made no claim to be carrying out an executive branch decision. Eight of the guardsmen were indicted by a grand jury. The guardsmen entered a self-defense plea. Most Americans were angry at war protestors and blamed the students. The judiciary got the message, and the criminal case was eventually dismissed. The civil case (wrongful death and injury) was settled for $675,000 and a statement of regret by the defendants.

The point isn’t that the government killed people. The point is that never prior to President Obama has a President asserted the power to murder citizens.

Over the last 20 years, the United States has had its own Mein Kampf transformation.

Terry Eastland’s book, Energy in the Executive: The Case for the Strong Presidency, presented ideas associated with the Federalist Society, an organization of Republican lawyers that works to reduce legislative and judicial restraints on executive power. Under the cover of wartime emergencies (the war on terror), the Bush/Cheney regime employed these arguments to free the president from accountability to law and to liberate Americans from their civil liberties. War and national security provided the opening for the asserted new powers, and a mixture of fear and desire for revenge for 9/11 led Congress, the judiciary, and the people to go along with the dangerous precedents.

As civilian and military leaders have been telling us for years, the war on terror is a 30-year project. After such time has passed, the presidency will have completed its transformation into Caesarism, and there will be no going back.

Indeed, as the neoconservative "Project For A New American Century" makes clear, the war on terror is only an opening for the neoconservative imperial ambition to establish US hegemony over the world.

As wars of aggression or imperial ambition are war crimes under international law, such wars require doctrines that elevate the leader above the law and the Geneva Conventions, as Bush was elevated by his Justice (sic) Department with minimal judicial and legislative interference.

Illegal and unconstitutional actions also require a silencing of critics and punishment of those who reveal government crimes. Thus Bradley Manning has been held for a year, mainly in solitary confinement under abusive conditions, without any charges being presented against him. A federal grand jury is at work concocting spy charges against Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange. Another federal grand jury is at work concocting terrorists charges against antiwar activists.

"Terrorist" and "giving aid to terrorists" are increasingly elastic concepts. Homeland Security has declared that the vast federal police bureaucracy has shifted its focus from terrorists to "domestic extremists."

It is possible that Awlaki was assassinated because he was an effective critic of the US government. Police states do not originate fully fledged. Initially, they justify their illegal acts by demonizing their targets and in this way create the precedents for unaccountable power. Once the government equates critics with giving "aid and comfort" to terrorists, as they are doing with antiwar activists and Assange, or with terrorism itself, as Obama did with Awlaki, it will only be a short step to bringing accusations against Glenn Greenwald and the ACLU.

The Obama Regime, like the Bush/Cheney Regime, is a regime that does not want to be constrained by law. And neither will its successor. Those fighting to uphold the rule of law, humanity’s greatest achievement, will find themselves lumped together with the regime’s opponents and be treated as such.

This great danger that hovers over America is unrecognized by the majority of the people. When Obama announced before a military gathering his success in assassinating an American citizen, cheers erupted. The Obama regime and the media played the event as a repeat of the (claimed) killing of Osama bin Laden. Two "enemies of the people" have been triumphantly dispatched. That the President of the United States was proudly proclaiming to a cheering audience sworn to defend the Constitution that he was a murderer and that he had also assassinated the US Constitution is extraordinary evidence that Americans are incapable of recognizing the threat to their liberty.

Emotionally, the people have accepted the new powers of the president. If the president can have American citizens assassinated, there is no big deal about torturing them. Amnesty International has sent out an alert that the US Senate is poised to pass legislation that would keep Guantanamo Prison open indefinitely and that Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) might introduce a provision that would legalize "enhanced interrogation techniques," an euphemism for torture.

Instead of seeing the danger, most Americans will merely conclude that the government is getting tough on terrorists, and it will meet with their approval. Smiling with satisfaction over the demise of their enemies, Americans are being led down the garden path to rule by government unrestrained by law and armed with the weapons of the medieval dungeon.

Americans have overwhelming evidence from news reports and YouTube videos of US police brutally abusing women, children, and the elderly, of brutal treatment and murder of prisoners not only in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and secret CIA prisons abroad, but also in state and federal prisons in the US. Power over the defenseless attracts people of a brutal and evil disposition.

A brutal disposition now infects the US military. The leaked video of US soldiers delighting, as their words and actions reveal, in their murder from the air of civilians and news service camera men walking innocently along a city street shows soldiers and officers devoid of humanity and military discipline. Excited by the thrill of murder, our troops repeated their crime when a father with two small children stopped to give aid to the wounded and were machine-gunned.

So many instances: the rape of a young girl and murder of her entire family; innocent civilians murdered and AK-47s placed by their side as "evidence" of insurgency; the enjoyment experienced not only by high school dropouts from torturing they-knew-not- who in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, but also by educated CIA operatives and Ph.D. psychologists. And no one held accountable for these crimes except two lowly soldiers prominently featured in some of the torture photographs.

What do Americans think will be their fate now that the "war on terror" has destroyed the protection once afforded them by the US Constitution? If Awlaki really needed to be assassinated, why did not President Obama protect American citizens from the precedent that their deaths can be ordered without due process of law by first stripping Awlaki of his US citizenship? If the government can strip Awlaki of his life, it certainly can strip him of citizenship. The implication is hard to avoid that the executive branch desires the power to terminate citizens without due process of law.

Governments escape the accountability of law in stages. Washington understands that its justifications for its wars are contrived and indefensible. President Obama even went so far as to declare that the military assault that he authorized on Libya without consulting Congress was not a war, and, therefore, he could ignore the War Powers Resolution of 1973, a federal law intended to check the power of the President to commit the US to an armed conflict without the consent of Congress.

Americans are beginning to unwrap themselves from the flag. Some are beginning to grasp that initially they were led into Afghanistan for revenge for 9/11. From there they were led into Iraq for reasons that turned out to be false. They see more and more US military interventions: Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and now calls for invasion of Pakistan and continued saber rattling for attacks on Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. The financial cost of a decade of the "war against terror" is starting to come home. Exploding annual federal budget deficits and national debt threaten Medicare and Social Security. Debt ceiling limits threaten government shut-downs.

War critics are beginning to have an audience. The government cannot begin its silencing of critics by bringing charges against US Representatives Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. It begins with antiwar protestors, who are elevated into "antiwar activists," perhaps a step below "domestic extremists." Washington begins with citizens who are demonized Muslim clerics radicalized by Washington’s wars on Muslims. In this way, Washington establishes the precedent that war protestors give encouragement and, thus, aid, to terrorists. It establishes the precedent that those Americans deemed a threat are not protected by law. This is the slippery slope on which we now find ourselves.

Last year the Obama Regime tested the prospects of its strategy when Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence, announced that the government had a list of American citizens that it was going to assassinate abroad. This announcement, had it been made in earlier times by, for example, Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, would have produced a national uproar and calls for impeachment. However, Blair’s announcement caused hardly a ripple. All that remained for the regime to do was to establish the policy by exercising it.

Readers ask me what they can do. Americans not only feel powerless, they are powerless. They cannot do anything. The highly concentrated, corporate-owned, government-subservient print and TV media are useless and no longer capable of performing the historic role of protecting our rights and holding government accountable. Even many antiwar Internet sites shield the government from 9/11 skepticism, and most defend the government’s "righteous intent" in its war on terror. Acceptable criticism has to be couched in words such as "it doesn’t serve our interests."

Voting has no effect. President "Change" is worse than Bush/Cheney. As Jonathan Turley suggests, Obama is "the most disastrous president in our history." Ron Paul is the only presidential candidate who stands up for the Constitution, but the majority of Americans are too unconcerned with the Constitution to appreciate him.

To expect salvation from an election is delusional. All you can do, if you are young enough, is to leave the country. The only future for Americans is a nightmare.

October 3, 2011

Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail], a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House.

Enforcing invisible "contracts"

Elizabeth Warren's Blank Check

by Robert P. Murphy

Recently a video of Elizabeth Warren has gone viral, garnering more than half a million views in the first ten days. After lambasting the policies of the Bush administration, Warren goes on to critique the claim that rich people have a right to the income from their activities. Warren argues that it is only fair that the rich give back to the community (in the form of higher taxes), since they benefit from the government investments that made their financial success possible.

Warren's argument is wrong both on principle and in practical application. It's important to spell out exactly why she's wrong, because her viewpoint is gaining traction among the progressive Left. Besides the obvious popularity of Warren's statements, Robert Frank's hip new book is another example of this assault on conventional property rights.

Warren's Case against Private Property

Starting at the 0:48 mark in the video, Warren says,

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

There are so many things wrong with Warren's analysis — which in context she is using to justify increasing tax rates on "the rich" — that it's hard to organize them. Let's first discuss the big-picture problems with her framing of the principles, and then we'll focus on the practical, economic flaws.

Warren's Flawed Philosophy

As Sheldon Richman acknowledged, Warren starts out on solid ground: nobody is an island. If we take the principle broadly enough, then obviously nobody got rich "on his own." We all benefit from being born into a society with a legal, cultural, and material infrastructure already in place. If it weren't for the prior existence of language (not to mention the discovery of mathematics and electricity), then the current members of the Forbes 400 list would be living like savages.

But what does this have to do with paying taxes to the government? Warren alludes to an "underlying social contract." Well it's very convenient for her to discuss this contract, which none of us has ever seen but apparently she can interpret.

Even on Warren's own terms, we would have to say that the community collectively decides how much it will tax people in order to provide goods that benefit the community (such as roads, national defense, etc.). So when the George W. Bush administration "cut taxes on the rich" — a move that Warren finds indefensible, as her earlier remarks in the video demonstrate — that was just as valid an exercise of the public's will as it will be if and when the Obama administration raises tax rates. Yet for some reason, Warren acts as if the "social contract" always means we can take more from rich people, regardless of how much we're currently taking. (If the Obama administration doesn't raise taxes back up to the 70 percent marginal tax rate on upper income earners like we had in the late 1970s, will Warren say it's because Jimmy Carter was breaking the underlying social contract back then?)

Warren is right: there is a widespread view that really wealthy people are very fortunate — that they have been blessed. And that's precisely why so many wealthy people give very large amounts of their fortunes to charitable causes. Warren simply asserts that the government should be the recipient of this understandable urge for the wealthy to share.

Besides philanthropy, another social practice is that parents take care of their children. Then, when the children become adults, they in turn take care of their offspring. This is exactly what Warren has in mind with her talk of "pay forward for the next kid who comes along." That's exactly what society expects of people, and that's what most of us do. Here again, we see Warren injecting the government into the mix, without any justification.

The final major principled problem with Warren's position is that the government gives the rich little choice in accepting the alleged benefits of its activities. It's not as if a factory has a choice between getting products via government highways or privately run highways. And CEOs in Boise — who don't think they are at serious risk of an al Qaeda attack — don't have the option of rejecting the US government's "helpful" foreign policy with its tremendous price tag.

To see just how absurd Warren's view is, imagine a Soviet-era party official chastising workers who thought they had labored long enough in a Siberian work camp: "You ungrateful wretches! Don't you realize that the bread your wives wait in line three hours for comes from the government? There is a social contract here, where we give you food and shelter, while you give us work and respect."

Practical Problems with Warren's Stance

Besides the principled objections, we can also raise several practical, economic problems with Warren's views. For one thing, a factory owner already does pay a lot for use of the government roads and labor services of his employees. In contrast to other "public goods," roads often have a much more dedicated payment stream, in the form of tolls and gasoline taxes. So the factory owner, who pays trucking companies to ship products around, is already paying a lot more to maintain the interstate highway system than is a lower-income person living in Manhattan with no car.

Regarding skilled workers, here too the factory owner already pays for it: we call these payments "wages" or "salaries." If someone goes to the University of California at Berkeley and becomes an excellent engineer, who is able to deliver an extra $150,000 in revenues to a factory owner, then with competitive labor markets we'd expect the engineer to earn close to $150,000.

This analysis doesn't mean that business owners are indifferent to educational quality, but it doesshow that things aren't quite as obvious as Warren makes them out to be. If students at state schools are receiving subsidized education that raises their productivity, the primary beneficiaries are the students themselves. So Warren should be asking them to cough up more money, not the employers who have to pay full freight for their services.

If we really wanted to be picky, we could ask if Warren thinks wealthy businesses that do not rely on roads, and that have few employees from government-funded schools, should get a break on their income taxes. For example, suppose a best-selling novelist went to private schools his entire life. Now he sits in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere, emailing his latest manuscripts to his agent. Except for Al Gore's Internet, what "public resources" is our novelist consuming? Why should he have to pay a large fraction of his income to the government?

Conclusion

Elizabeth Warren's argument for higher taxes on the rich fails on both principled and pragmatic grounds. Rather than giving a well-defined and philosophically defensible justification for a specific policy, she is arguing for a blank check for politicians to squeeze ever more out of "the rich" — which in practice will include the middle class.

Can the Chinese bail out the Europeans?

The China Model Is Unsustainable

Property bubble: Zhengzhou New District features vast public buildings that have never been used

by Doug French

While the pols in Europe endlessly consider how they will paper over their financial crisis, "ring fence" Greece and the other PIIGS pass austerity programs, and still get reelected, some speculate that perhaps China will step forward to bail out the eurozone.

In recent years a number of investment gurus have touted China as the new financial powerhouse, while at the same time the country serves as punching bag for both sitting and would-be American politicians. Senator Charles Schumer claims the Chinese are manipulating the yuan, causing millions to lose their jobs in America. "More than any single stimulus program we could pass into law, forcing China to revalue its currency is the biggest step we could take to protect American jobs," Schumer said. "This is not about China-bashing. This is about defending the United States."

Donald Trump unleashed this tirade on Wolf Blitzer's CNN Situation Room:

They're manipulating their currency. Intellectual property rights and everything else are a joke over there. They're making stuff that you see being sold all the time on Fifth Avenue, copying various, you know, whether it's Chanel or whatever it may be, the brands, and just selling it ad — ad nauseum. I mean this is a country that is ripping off the United States like nobody other than OPEC has ever done before.

But is China the capitalist powerhouse everyone thinks they are? This China-is-taking-over-the-world talk makes a person wonder if members of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China pored over Human Action, implementing a better Misesian capitalist mousetrap.

However, Chinese economic growth has exploded on the shakiest of financial systems, Carl E. Walter and Fraser J.T. Howie point out in Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China's Extraordinary Rise. The country's central planners do their best to keep as many of the 1.3 billion people employed as they can; building vacant cities and dozens of large infrastructure projects along with releasing eye-popping "official" GDP numbers. All of this has some observers believing China will use every barrel of oil, yard of cement, and pound of yellowcake the world has to offer.

Nonetheless, reading Howie and Walter's eye-opening book makes a reader wonder how the whole Chinese economy hasn't imploded already. The Chinese have developed stock markets and debt markets, pension funds, home loans, and credit cards. From afar it looks sort of like capitalism, providing comfort to investors. However, the authors point out; "[Investors] would not feel that way if China explicitly relied on a Soviet-inspired financial system even though, in truth, this is largely what China remains."

Red Capitalism is clearly written, but at the same time it is so littered with acronyms standing for the various government entities that comprise the thicket of state organizations that make up the Chinese financial system the reader is constantly confused. Take for example this sentence:

By 2005, Huijin had become the controlling shareholder on behalf of the state and enjoyed majority representation on the boards of directors of CCB and BOC and, together with the MOF, of ICBC, CDB, ABC and a host of other financial institutions.

Got that?

The upshot from following the alphabet soup of entities, created to make loans to the state sector and friends of the state, is that when the loans go bad, which an extraordinary percentage do, then new entities are created into which to move the debts: from good banks to bad banks to worse banks.

The cease and desist regime

EPA Boosts Water Policing as Farmers Say Worst Fears Realized

By Mark Drajem 

Fifth-generation farmer Kenny Watkins ran afoul of the U.S. clean-water police in 2009. His infraction: Planting hay in a pasture.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ordered Watkins to stop cultivating a 160-acre (65-hectare) tract in central California because he might destroy seasonal ponds and harm the San Joaquin River. Watkins has defied the decision and the federal government’s control over what he can grow on his farm.

His battle is cited by agriculture groups as they try to fend off a proposal by the Corps and the Environmental Protection Agency to enlarge the U.S. role in guarding waterways against contamination. The two agencies are reviewing a plan that would require permits under the Clean Water Act for work on wetlands or small channels that are usually dry. They say they’re clarifying authority they already have and critics say it’s a power grab.

“Our worst fears are being realized,” Watkins, 48, said in an interview with Bloomberg Government, predicting his experience may be repeated on cropland across the country. “They keep coming up with more tools to use against us.”

Farmers aren’t the only ones complaining. Homebuilders, railroad companies and steelmakers say the added bureaucracy would make them spend thousands of dollars seeking permits and increase costs. They would need to get U.S. approval to dig out new basements, repair bridges or dispose of waste, they say.

Unsafe Rivers

Redefining the government’s reach “is part of the problem,” and an example of the “uncertainty out there,” Bill Kovacs, senior vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in an interview.

About one-third of American rivers and lakes aren’t healthful for swimming or fishing, according to the EPA. The added enforcement would help “ensure a safe supply for drinking, irrigation and livestock watering,” Nancy Stoner, the agency’s acting assistant administrator for water, said in a Sept. 23 e-mail.

For decades, government officials and businesses have disputed the meaning of one phrase -- the “waters of the United States” -- in the 1972 anti-pollution law.

The two agencies, which are jointly responsible for enforcement, unveiled an interpretation in April that lets them oversee wet patches linked to larger bodies, such as the Chesapeake Bay, whether or not connections are visible on the surface.

300,000 Comments

The authority would “help restore protection to our waters” and “provide clearer, more predictable guidelines,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in an April 27 statement.

The proposal prompted 300,000 comments, more than any change in the Clean Water Act’s 39 years, according to the EPA. While most of those were organized by environmental groups who are supportive, according to a compilation published on the government website Regulations.gov, the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives is trying to kill the effort through the budget process.

The water plan would be prevented under an appropriations bill passed July 15 by the House. The Senate would need to approve the measure before it could be sent to President Barack Obama.

The lawmakers’ action is consistent with a broader Republican attempt to restrain the EPA. On Sept. 23, the House adopted legislation to kill two pending air-pollution rules and delay a dozen more while their effect on the economy is studied.

Supreme Court

The guidelines would add less than 3 percent to the area under Clean Water Act jurisdiction, the EPA said in an analysis published on its website. Increased oversight would cost government and industry about $171 million, while resulting in benefits of $162 million to $368 million, according to an EPA report.

In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a new round of hearings for Michigan landowners whose efforts to build on their property had been stymied by the Corps. In the case, Rapanos v. U.S., Justice Anthony Kennedy said the government could regulate waters with a “significant nexus” to major waterways. Justice Antonin Scalia, who joined the majority in the decision, called that reasoning “opaque.”

“The Supreme Court confused the issue,” Jon Devine, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, said in an interview. The EPA is now “trying to bring some clarity into the realm where lawyers like me are arguing.”

Bridges, Culverts

That plan amounts to a longer reach for the government, companies such as steelmaker Nucor Corp. and oil producer Chesapeake Energy Corp. (CHK) said in comments filed with the EPA.

The proposed guidelines “create a regulatory environment in which it would be difficult to find a tributary or wetland water even a hundred miles away from a navigable water” that would escape government oversight, according to unsigned comments submitted in July by Omaha, Nebraska-based Union Pacific Corp. (UNP)

Applying for permits would slow or prevent repair and inspection of the railroad’s 20,000 bridges, 100,000 culverts and its dikes, levees and access roads, Union Pacific said.

Agriculture has led the opposition, with state farm bureaus organizing write-in campaigns against the rules.

According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, a 48- square mile area in Kentucky contained 40 miles of permanent streams. The bureau said the EPA and Corps proposal would bring an additional 360 miles of so-called ephemeral waters, which are dry except when snow melts or heavy rains fall, under U.S. purview.

All Tied Up

“You go from being able to do some economic activity, to having all economic activity tied up,” Don Parrish, senior director for regulatory relations at the Washington-based farm trade group, said in an interview. “It’s huge and it’s broad.”

The permit process may cost up to $30,000, Parrish said.

The new guidelines wouldn’t change any longstanding exemptions, such as ornamental ponds, Stoner said.

To reassure critics, the EPA also published a bulletin saying it won’t target “normal, ongoing” farming or ranching.

That wouldn’t have helped Watkins, who was changing the use of his land. He’d been grazing cows on the tract where he wanted to capitalize on rising feed prices by expanding his crops. He turned a separate pasture into a walnut grove.

Watkins, first vice president of the California Farm Bureau Federation, said he hired consultants to avoid violating any rules on his farm 12 miles from Stockton.

Aerial Photos

For his troubles, his family got a “cease and desist” notice from the Corps’ California Delta Branch.

The Corps used aerial photos to trace the discharge of pooled water on Watkins’s field to a slough that feeds the river. Because of the linkage, the U.S. had the right to stop plowing, which could ruin the ponds and hurt the salamanders and fairy shrimp that live there, according to Krystel Bell, project manager in the agency’s Sacramento district.

Bell said Watkins refused permission for an on-site inspection. “We were willing to explore” allowing the hayfield and orchard, she said in an interview.

Watkins gave up on the oats, barley and rye grass he wanted to raise for grain hay. He said he’s kept the walnut trees and hopes the Corps will take him to court -- so he can challenge its orders.

While he waits for his chance at a trial, he said he is forgoing $70,000 a year in sales and worrying that the plans in Washington could give the government more sway over his 2,000- acre farm.

The federal officials “want to increase their empire,” Watkins said. “That’s what their ambitions are.”

Can a Geriatric Germany Save Europe?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

As Greece lurches on the precipice of default on its sovereign debt, a default that could bring down banks across Europe and precipitate a global financial panic, a consensus is building that there is but one way out.

First, a structured default on the Greek debt, giving creditors a major haircut, but compensating them with eurobonds of half the face value of the Greek bonds, guaranteed by the European Central Bank.

Second, a huge new European Financial Stabilization Facility of trillions of euros to recapitalize stricken banks and buy up the sovereign debt of Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Spain, should private investors flee their bonds.

Such a solution, however, depends upon Germany, the richest nation in Europe and major contributor to the ECB.

Hard-money Germans, however, do not relish bailing out the deadbeat nations of Club Med who have more generous welfare states than their own.

Politically, it may not be possible to cajole or coerce the Germans, indefinitely, into saving the eurozone, the collapse of which could bring on a depression and bring down the European Union itself.

There is another reason the European Monetary Union and EU may be headed for the boneyard: demography.

Looking over the 2008 World Population Prospects from the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs, one finds that the nation which is to carry Europe back to solvency is aging, shrinking and dying.

Every decade of this century, Germany will become less able to sustain its dynamism, let alone carry the continent.

Consider. In 2010, there were 82 million Germans. Fully 26 percent were 60 years of age or older; 20 percent were 65 or older; 5 percent were 80 or older.

Now, fast forward to 2050.

Between 2010 and mid-century, 12 million Germans will disappear. In 2050, Germany will be a nation of 70 million, whose median age will have risen from 44 today to 51. And the life expectancy of all Germans will rise from today’s 80 years to 84.

The average German may enjoy four more years of life, but he or she will also require four more years of social security and health care provided by the taxpaying public. And that taxpaying public is also going to shrink.

By 2050, the percentage of Germans over 60 will have risen from 26 to nearly 40 percent. The percentage 65 and over will have risen from 20.5 to 32.5 percent, and the share over 80 will have tripled from the present 5 percent of the population to 14 percent.

By 2050, one in three Germans will be 65 or over, and one in seven will be 80 or over. That is a lot of old-timers for working Germans, whose numbers and share of the population will have been dramatically reduced, to support.

Moreover, the percentage of German women in the childbearing ages of 15 to 49 will have fallen from today’s 45 percent to 34 percent, guaranteeing a continuous decline in the German population for the rest of the century.

There is not a single year between 1970 and 2050 where Germany’s birth rate even approaches the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. By mid-century, Germany will have been below zero population growth for 80 years. This is a nation slowly taking its leave of this world.

For Club Med to be rescued, the shrinking German labor force will have to carry an ever-expanding cohort of German retirees and aged, as well as growing numbers of retired and aged of the debt-ridden south of Europe.

Consider the nation closet to default: Greece.

In 1950, nearly half of Greece’s population was 24 or younger. In 2050, less than one-fourth of all Greeks will be 24 or younger.

Today, one-fourth of all Greeks are 60 or older. But in 2050, it will be nearly 38 percent. Less than 4 percent of Greeks are 80 or over today. By 2050, that will have tripled to almost 11 percent.

Italy, a country of 60 million, is on schedule to lose 3 million people by 2050. The share of Italy’s population 65 or over will go from one-fifth today to one-third by mid-century.

Italians over 80 will double from 6 percent today to 13 percent in 2050. Life expectancy will rise by four years to close to 86.

Across Europe, not one nation has a birth rate sufficient to replace its native-born population. The share that is of working age is shriveling, while the share that is eligible for state-funded pensions, social security and health care is growing.

And it is the Germans who are leading Europe into retirement centers, assisted living facilities and nursing homes.

Europe needs more young workers to maintain the dynamism of the continent and make good on all promises made to her people.

To the south, the exploding Muslim populations of the Maghreb and the Middle East appear ready to come and help out.

“This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”