To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (36 page)

And of course, while each of us is trying to penetrate and understand the other, we are simultaneously on defense trying to block others from penetrating and understanding us.

Despite our historic advantage in these efforts, today our competitors’ capabilities are growing quickly. The Russians are technically the best. The Chinese are still learning, but they make up in sheer numbers what they lack in sophistication. By some estimates there may be as many as 150,000 or more Chinese nationals engaged in cyberintelligence.
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All of us understand the importance of virus protection on our computer. Imagine the depth of defense the Pentagon and other institutions now must build to block competitors from penetrating and learning our secrets. Cybersecurity is clearly a growth industry.

Cyberdefense will become a more expensive part of national security, increasingly pervading the entire system of both government and private sector communications. It will involve deep investments in math and science education to produce people who are good enough to stay ahead of the Russians, Chinese, and others.

Strategic cyberwarfare is a fundamentally different type of threat from anything we’ve previously seen. In strategic cyberwarfare your opponents use their capability to disrupt your society. For example, smartgrids are a current buzzword in electricity distribution. Yet, the very nature of a smartgrid makes them vulnerable to cyberpenetration. Imagine an opponent turning off all the electricity distribution in the United States.

The first strategic cyberattack occurred in 2007 in Estonia, after that government relocated a Soviet World War II memorial along with the graves of some Soviet soldiers.
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The move incensed the Russian government and provoked retaliation from Russian computer hackers. Since Estonia had recently become a paperless government, its pride in its new Internet- and computer-based administrative system suddenly became a nightmare as the Russians systematically disrupted it, along with basic Internet service.

The Estonian incident provides a case study in cyberwar. Without killing or even injuring anyone, Russia put enormous pressure on a small neighbor and intimidated other countries.

How vulnerable is America to a cyberattack? It’s hard to say, because no one really knows exactly how sophisticated Russian, Chinese, and other investments in strategic cyberwar have become.

This is not a threat of the future.

This is the reality of today.

Because cyberattacks are non-lethal, they don’t receive much attention. But views would change if our economy and our government were wrecked in a cyberattack.

We must make as big an investment in cyber capabilities as we made over the last two generations in strategic nuclear systems. This goal will require an increase of about two orders of magnitude (100-fold) from our current cyber investments.

Biological warfare is probably less of a threat than nuclear, EMP, or cyber attacks. Nonetheless it has to be taken seriously both because of the explosion of new knowledge in biology and because of the level of mass fear that even a small biological attack would generate.

Sadly, the breakthroughs in biological knowledge that will extend our lives create the potential for someone to use the same science to develop mutations and adaptations to create new biological threats.

However, the routine work done by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, combined with the specialized work of national security labs, creates a reasonably strong capability to respond to a biological threat.

Our greatest vulnerability is in having a public health system and a health information system that react and share information too
slowly. We should invest in an electronic health system to ensure that any attack would be detected early and analyzed quickly, and that countermeasures would be rapidly implemented.

Such a real-time electronic health system will save thousands and possibly even millions of lives if we are hit with a biological attack. It would also save lives in the event of a pandemic.

Investing in these health systems is less expensive than preparing for cyberattacks or EMP attacks, but it’s a vital national and homeland security measure to enable us to outlast our enemies and protect the American people.

As this book details, the United States has become mired in many policies and institutions whose development is increasingly being outpaced by China.

While we remain a bigger economic power than China and our military is vastly stronger, all the trend lines are in the wrong direction.

Our schools are inadequate.

Our litigation system is destructive.

Our regulatory system ties us up and inhibits effective development.

Our tax policy is anti-investment, anti-saving, and anti-jobs.

Our aging infrastructure is becoming uncompetitive in the world market.

The cost of our government is robbing the economy of vital resources and is piling up debt that will burden the next generation.

We are sending billions a year to China to pay for interest on the U.S. debt, money that the Chinese invest in more modern and more competitive systems.

If these trends continue, we will face two grave national security threats, one quantitative and one qualitative.

Quantitatively, we could face a Chinese competitor a generation from now that can out-manufacture and out-produce the U.S. economy. This would be the first time since 1840 that we would not be the world’s most productive economy. All our great victories for 170 years have relied on our ability to drown our opponents with resources they could not match. America has truly been the arsenal of democracy. Losing this quantitative edge would jeopardize our national security.

Qualitatively, the Chinese insistence on good education and investment in science and technology could begin to produce capabilities we literally will not understand. The rate of evolution in scientific knowledge is rapidly accelerating, and there is no reason to believe competition with China can be won by a redistributionist, bureaucratic, anti-growth America that protects incompetent schools and favors becoming a lawyer over becoming a scientist or engineer.

If we allow ourselves to drift into a world in which China is both quantitatively and qualitatively superior to us, we should expect to lose our independence and be forced to exist within the framework of Chinese demands. That would be the end of America as we know it.

Note that everything we need to do to compete with China is within our own power. If we replace our policies and our institutions with ones that emphasize free markets, individual rights, and rapid economic and energy development, we will mitigate the Chinese threat for the next fifty years.

The burden is on us, and the challenge is here in America.

 

 

 

T
he rise of the tea party movement in 2009 is a great example of the American people’s courageous tradition of rejecting elitism and insisting on freedom.

The American colonists who rebelled against the British government felt their rights as “free Englishmen”—which they claimed regardless of their ethnic background—were being abused by a tyrannical government whose judges, bureaucrats, and politicians showed no respect for Americans.

The revolutionary flag depicting a snake with the motto “Don’t tread on me” was another visceral expression of this proud sense of independence. Likewise, the original Boston Tea Party of 1773 was an act of defiance meant to show the British government that it could not impose its will on Americans.

Having long admired the tea party as a model of political activism, in 1994 I encouraged a friend of mine, Sharon Cooper (now a state representative in Georgia), to write a book called
Taxpayer’s Tea Party
. Rush Limbaugh wrote the foreword. I led a group to Boston on April 15 that year to protest the Clinton tax increases, an event that helped set the stage for the Contract with America campaign that would result in Republicans winning control of Congress that fall.

We see a similar energy among grassroots Americans today, propelled by the Left’s arrogant, big-tax, big-spending, big-deficit, politician-centered policies. But the anger actually began simmering earlier, with the bailouts and failed stimulus plans of the late Bush administration. The Obama campaign promised something different—“change you can believe in”—but once in power simply increased federal spending dramatically with even more bailouts and an even bigger stimulus bill.

The spark that transformed widespread outrage into a political movement was lit on February 19, 2009, with the now-famous rant by CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli. Appalled at President Obama’s bailout of people with delinquent mortgages, Santelli exclaimed on live TV, “How many of you want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage?” He continued, “President Obama, are you listening? People are of the notion that you can’t buy your way into prosperity. . . . If you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson . . . what we’re doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves!”
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The original American rebels had committees of correspondence; the 2009 rebels had the Internet. Clips of Santelli’s rant went viral as Americans, just as in 1773, began thinking and talking about their rights, responsibilities, and what it means to be an American. Inspired by this discussion, an estimated 30,000 people attended tea parties in fifty cities on February 27, 2009.

Despite the efforts of the elite media to either ignore or downplay the tea partiers, the movement grew rapidly, with an estimated 1.2 million people attending tea parties in over 850 locations on tax day, April 15, 2009.

I had the honor of speaking at the New York City tea party, which drew an estimated 12,500 attendees. There, I got to know Kellen Giuda, one of the main organizers. I was impressed by his ability to organize using mediums like Facebook, Twitter, and email. Kellen explained,

Remarkably, like the British in 1773, the elite media today misunderstand and mock the frustration of American tea partiers. Since the elite media believe in big government, big bureaucracy, and high taxes, and since they love the way President Obama is delivering that agenda, they think tea partiers’ grievances are unjustified. This bias was perfectly captured in the April 15, 2009, interview of a Chicago tea party attendee by then-CNN reporter Susan Roesgen. As an attendee is responding to a question from Roesgen by explaining Lincoln’s thinking on constitutional rights, Roesgen interrupts him and asks, “Sir, what does that have to do with your taxes? Do you realize that you’re eligible for a $400 credit?”

This is the same condescending arrogance that the British showed in assuming Americans would accept taxation without representation as long as the East India Company kept tea prices low.

Since the tea party movement is rooted in individual liberty and skepticism of centralized power, it’s logical that the movement is evolving differently all over the country. Skeptical of any efforts to be controlled or cajoled by national organizations, personalities, or political parties, the movement is growing stronger and larger as it retains its decentralized structure. While tea party leaders agree on broad principles such as limited government, lower taxes, and individual liberty, they address different issues in different areas.

Through American Solutions (and especially Adam Waldeck, who coordinates American Solutions’ activities with tea partiers), I have met with tea party leaders and organizers across the country, listening and learning about what drives them and what they’re doing. Here are some examples: