Ever since late Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson imposed his “Great Society” program on America in mid-1960ties, bad things have been happening to our country.

His “Civil Rights” initiative brought the curses of multiculturalism and diversity on our heads. (If diversity were strength then we should be one invincible and booming economy on Earth, leaving everybody else in dust. Which, unfortunately, we are no more.)

His “War on Poverty” led to unprecedented growth of the population of America’s poor (despite the fact that many of them have been masquerading as “public employees” on the dole of federal and many local governments).

His “Immigration Reform” opened the flood gate for tens of millions of imported poor from cultures incompatible with ours and of diverse ethnicities, which opening turned upside-down the pre-1960 America’s demographic balance. (The ongoing Mexican conquest of the American Southwest is but one result of it.)

I leave the completion and an in-depth study of the above list to others.

His followers, eager to obscure absurd consequences of Johnson’s program, kept inventing nonsense after nonsense (and still are) that inflict more and more damage to the already weakened nation.

The IQ tests were banned because blacks and some other minorities were doing badly on them. Then the academic standards were watered down for the same reason. (And so were the immigration standards, in order to not “discriminate” against less talented but more assertive people if they happened to have a different hue of skin than the majority of Americans.) Then, in order to make the holders of university degrees “look like the rest of America”, a double standard for college admissions and graduation was introduced, first in some Ivy League schools, and later in the rest of the academia.

But that wasn’t nearly enough for “Liberals” in order for them to prove their fallacious mantra that “equal opportunity” translates onto equal outcomes. So they kept dismantling time-proven, merit-based selection criteria one after another, replacing them with those based on political “necessities”, like the “need” of diversity and “social justice”, and relentlessly pushing for more and more. Unfortunately, corporate America caved in to “Liberal” demands and jumped on this “affirmative action” workforce diversity bandwagon. And guess what, the effects of this collective insanity started to show up.

The competitiveness of American economy worsens. Once a backward country, Communist China, threatens American technological supremacy (while the “Liberal” media are salivating). The national debt reached staggering 13 trillion dollars. The foreclosures and bankruptcies are up. The unemployment is at firm 10 percent, and the only sector that is growing today is the public sector (government jobs) that by and large does not produce any wealth and relies on taxation and steady supply of freshly printed money. (The value of dollar, not surprisingly, is nose-diving.) American students, once our source of pride and future technological progress and economic growth, lag in terms of academic achievements. (The United States ranks 21st of 30 countries in scientific literacy, and the U.S. score of 489 fell below the average of 500, according to Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.) And one of the few major indices, in addition to government spending and national debt, that keeps going up is the level of taxation of those hard-working Americans who produce more than they consume (roughly, half of the nation in production age, that is).

To understand the reasons of this sorry state of affairs, just look at some companies that “diversified” their top executive echelons. Like, for instance, Oracle. Its black president (famous for his 8 years long extramarital affair) must have been a genius because he overtook others more qualified ones while holding an MBA from a second-rate university. Would it surprise you that Oracle’s products (like, for instance, “People’s Soft”) bear more resemblance to user-unfriendly socialist production than to what one could expect from the technologically most advanced country, the U.S? It does not surprise me. (I doubt if Oracle’s CEO is a genius, either.)

Again, I leave this topic, as well as related ones, like the disastrous economic effects of “Liberal”-promoted investment policies (adopted, for instance, by some large public employee retirement funds) that preferred “politically correct” companies over the profitable ones, to others for a more thorough investigation.

As the economy gets global, with multinational corporations eradicating national borders, the engineered diversity trend has metastasized to other Western countries. Now, everybody and his brother, at least among the West’s political and corporate elites, is preaching diversity and ethno-cultural egalitarianism. This must have had its serious detrimental impact on clockwork-like functioning of Western high tech industries. So, if you tell me that the recent disaster at a British Petroleum oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico caught you by surprise then you either did not pay attention or you belong to one of the two categories of people that I mention in the closing of this column. After all, decades of blurring the differences between the gifted and the successful on one hand, and the dull and the failed on another, must have created a perfect condition for serious decision mistakes and major design errors, never mind day-to-day operation flaws. It was a disaster waiting to happen, or – should I say – that have happened. And that has been the price that we are and will be paying for allowing the “Liberal” social engineers to implement their maniacal vision of “all people are equal” America.

It can only be surprising to a brainwashed moron or indoctrinated “Liberal” (or a combination thereof) that the disastrous program initiated by Johnson in mid-1960ties derailed, little by little, train America from its fast track towards bright future. No matter how one tries to rationalize it out (or, I should say, propagandize it out), all the economically unsustainable, if not outright absurd, “Liberal” ideas, however small and seemingly inconsequential each of them might look when considered separately, must have added to a substantial wealth drain and an impediment of this once pretty well functioning country resulting in a damage that has not been offset by the supposed benefits of a “more just” society. Just like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, this net damage will not just go away. Its persistence follows a simple budget law: if you keep depleting your checking account more than the total of all deposits made, you will be left with a zero balance, eventually, no matter what clever accounting tricks you try. (Coincidentally, budget discipline is something that most of “Liberal” politicians seem unable to exercise or even understand.) Sure, there were many profiteers, free riders, crooks, and other criminals that learned how to skim this nation using various opportunities created by “Liberal” policies. But the bottom line is that virtually none of the grave crises that are threatening the well-being and the survival of this nation today would have become so severe if it weren’t for what Johnson had started and the “Liberals” have continued. He was the chief engineer of the “Great Society” failed experiment that turned into a great disaster with lasting consequences, despite the unprecedented scientific and technological progress that the digital revolution has brought about.

For that reason, Johnson was the worst past president in modern history of the U.S. Although he passed away decades ago, his ideas are still decimating America’s wealth and might. The bad news is that nothing will really improve until all those who still worship him and praise his harmful program, or try to silence the courageous critics (Rand Paul comes to mind here) of the draconian laws passed on his watch, are separated from political power. The good news is that the cure for this national malady is as close as the voting booth next to where you live.

Just go there and vote, wisely so.

FURTHER READING ON THIS SUBJECT
When nobody votes, the Democrats win

June 4, 2010

~ The Author ~
Mr. Dwyer has been a continuing contributor to the Federal Observer. Mark Andrew Dwyer’s commentaries (updated frequently) can be found here. Send your comments to readerswrite@yahoo.com.