Can One Love One's Country and Hate Its Government?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."

Jefferson's brutal verdict comes to mind in the fierce debate over inversions, those decisions by U.S. companies to buy foreign firms to move their headquarters abroad and renounce their U.S. citizenship — to evade the U.S. corporate tax rate of 35 percent.

U.S. executives who engineer these inversions are undeniably acting in the best interests of their shareholders and companies.

But are they also lacking in economic patriotism? Are they also guilty of economic treason against the nation that nurtured them?

Are they, in the phrase tossed out by Barack Obama, "corporate deserters"? Adds our president, "I don't care if it's legal, it's wrong."

But are inversions wrong? Or are these relocations abroad neither more nor less moral than Boeing's decision to save hundreds of millions in labor costs by shifting 1,300 engineering jobs out of Seattle and Southern California to St. Louis, Charleston and Huntsville?

Is it morally permissible to leave your home state or region for economic reasons — as the textile mills left New England for the South — but unpatriotic to leave the land of your birth?

If so, was it not unpatriotic for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Fortune 500 to lobby for NAFTA and GATT so companies could shutter their factories here, lay off their U.S. workers, and move their production to Mexico and Asia?

Was it not unpatriotic of Congress and Presidents Clinton and Bush to facilitate the departure of tens of thousands of plants and millions of manufacturing jobs?

Where were the economic patriots then?

What has concentrated the mind here is the decision by Burger King, backed by shareholder Warren Buffett, to buy Tim Hortons in Canada. Burger King will move its headquarters to Canada, declare itself a Canadian company, and begin paying the Canadian corporate tax rate of 26 percent.

Ireland, with its 12.5 percent corporate income tax has proven a particularly attractive residence for companies shopping for lower tax rates. Before this year, Apple had used Ireland as a tax haven to shelter $40 billion in revenue.

Britain, too, has proven a magnet. U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer made a $118 billion bid this year for AstraZeneca so it could move its tax domicile there, but was rebuffed by the target company.

Forty-nine U.S. companies have completed tax inversions. Twenty more are looking at them. The prospect that a lame duck Congress may take up legislation to end the practice and stanch the bleeding of tax revenue from the U.S. Treasury could cause a stampede.

Treasury is talking of a December law, made retroactive back to May, to strip the tax benefits from inversions. The prospect that the loophole may disappear could accelerate corporate flight out of the high-tax USA.

Some $2.1 trillion in corporate profits, subject to U.S. taxation, is already being held abroad, parked, and not repatriated, lest the holders get hit with the U.S. tax rate. Some U.S. companies are borrowing these funds from abroad and deducting the interest payments.

At bottom, the inversions issue is not only about corporate tax rates and competitiveness, but also about loyalties in conflict.

Actor Gerard Depardieu renounced his French citizenship rather than pay the 75 percent income tax rate imposed by the Socialist regime of Francois Hollande. Though denounced, was Depardieu being disloyal to France, or to the Hollande regime and its socialist ideology?

Can one love one's country and hate its government?

In 1776, that was surely true of Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton and Washington. And their rebellion had something to do with taxation.

Are New York City cops and civil servants who retire and take their pensions to Florida being disloyal to the Empire State because they want to stop paying the 12 percent state-local income tax bite?

When states like Texas eliminate corporate income taxes, are they engaged in beggar-thy-neighbor politics against fellow states of the Union?

"Taxes are what we pay for civilized society," said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. But is Ireland less civilized than America because her corporate tax rate is one-third of ours?

Judge Learned Hand had another take:

"There is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant."

To our transnationalists, Judge Hand got it right.

But whether one is an economic patriot or a libertarian, to keep the U.S. corporate tax rate at the highest level in a global economy of ferociously competitive nations would appear to reflect the thinking of an incorrigibly stupid and stubborn government.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?
COPYRIGHT 2014 CREATORS.COM

In Three Countries Where the US " Helped," It Created the Power Vacuum that the Islamic Fanatics Have Moved Into

By Pat Buchanan

The decisions that determined the fate of the great nations and empires that failed to survive the 20th century are well known.

For the Kaiser's Germany, it was the "blank cheque" to Austria after Sarajevo. For Great Britain, the 1939 war guarantee to Poland. For the Third Reich, it was the June 1941 invasion of Russia. For the Empire of the Sun, the decision to attack Pearl Harbor.

And for the Soviet Empire, it was the invasion of Afghanistan.

As for the United States, historians may one day concur with the late Gen. Bill Odom. For the lone superpower to survive that century, the decision to invade and occupy Iraq was the most disastrous blunder in

Is Hillary Inevitable?

By Patrick Buchanan

Looking back over the last century there were two great coalition builders in presidential politics: FDR and Richard Nixon.

Franklin Roosevelt broke the Lincoln lock on the presidency that had given Republicans the White House in 56 of the previous 72 years. From 1932 to 1964, FDR's party would win seven of nine elections.

Nixon broke through in '68 and built the New Majority that gave the GOP the White House for 20 of the next 24 years.

The Nixon-Reagan coalition, however, has aged and atrophied.

In five of the last six presidential elections, the Democratic nominee won the popular vote. And no fewer than 18 states, including four of the most populous — California, Illinois, Pennsylvania and New York — have gone Democratic in all six of those elections.

Also, four states crucial to victory and once regarded as reliably Republican — Florida, Ohio, Virginia and Colorado — have turned purple.

The GOP is also facing a demographic crisis. White folks, who provide almost 90 percent of Republican votes in presidential years, are steadily shrinking as a share of the electorate.

Is Hillary thus inevitable?

With the cash she can raise and the support of the sisterhood, she may be able to clear the field in the run for the nomination. And in a general election it is hard to see which Republican today could take 270 electoral votes from her.

Yet the lady has vulnerabilities. If elected, Hillary would be

US Bombing Won't Save Iraq

By Patrick Buchanan

The panic that engulfed this capital after the fall of Mosul, when it appeared that the Islamist fanatics of ISIS would overrun Baghdad, has passed.

And the second thoughts have begun.

"U.S. Sees Risk in Iraqi Airstrikes," ran the June 19 headline in the Washington Post, "Military Warns of Dangerous Complications."

This is welcome news. For if it is an unwritten rule of republics not to commit to war unless the nation is united, America has never been less prepared for a Mideast war.

Our commander in chief is a reluctant warrior who wants his legacy to be ending our two longest wars. And just as Obama does not want to go back into Iraq, neither does the U.S. military.

The American people want

Their War, Not Ours

By Patrick Buchanan

As the Islamic warriors of ISIS rolled down the road from Mosul, John McCain was an echo of

Is Obama's Worst Foreign Policy Blunder Developing in Front of Our Eyes?

By Patrick Buchanan

With his address at West Point, President Obama succeeded where all his previous efforts had failed. He brought us together.

Nobody seems to have liked the speech.

A glance shows that the New York Times and Washington Times, the Financial Times and Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal were all disappointed with it.

As was said of one of Harding's addresses, it was "an army of pompous phrases marching across the landscape in search of an idea."

What Obama has is less a foreign policy doctrine than a foreign policy disposition. He is a reluctant interventionist.

He got us out of Iraq and is taking us out of Afghanistan. Yet he was pushed into a war on Libya that turned out disastrously and is now dipping his toe into what he has called "somebody else's civil war" in Syria.

Still, Obama's foreign policy is not going to be judged on what he said, but what he did and failed to do. The same holds for

Is Democracy Another God that Failed?

Patrick J. Buchanan

On Memorial Day weekend, scores of thousands of bikers arrived here for their annual Rolling Thunder tribute to America's veterans, especially those lost in our wars or left behind.

But this year the tribute has been sullied by a squalid scandal in the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Sick vets seeking medical care at the Phoenix VA hospital were put on waiting lists, but never got to see a doctor. Dozens died. Then waiting lists were altered to make it appear that VA staffers had not failed in their duty to provide the vets access to care in the required 14 days. Some vets suffered for months before dying.

There is truly something rotten in the state.

But, rest assured, this scandal of deceit, dishonor and betrayal is not going

A Left-Right Convergence?

By Patrick Buchanan

Last summer, in this capital of gridlock, a miracle occurred.

The American people rose as one and told the government of the United States

Abolish the Corporate Income Tax!

By Patrick Buchanan

News that Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, plans to buy Britain's AstraZeneca for $106 billion, renounce its U.S. citizenship, and declare itself a British company, has jolted Congress.

Pfizer is being denounced as disloyal to the land of its birth, and politicians are devising ways to stop Pfizer from departing.

Yet Pfizer is not alone. Hedge fund managers are urging giant corporations like Walgreens to go nation-shopping for new residences abroad to evade the

What the Establishment Does to Those Who Don't Fall in Line with the War Hawks

By Patrick Buchanan

The GOP Beltway establishment is celebrating the victory of Thom Tillis, Speaker of the North Carolina House, over his Tea Party and Evangelical rivals in Tuesday's primary for the U.S. Senate.

But the story ended less happily for the Beltway elite in the Tar Heel State's 3rd Congressional District. There, the planned purge of Rep. Walter Jones was repulsed by his loyal Republican base.

Yet, this massively funded effort, to kill the career of a 20-year House veteran, whose father held the seat for decades before him, testifies eloquently to the intolerance of the ideological and monied elite of the party to which conservatives give allegiance.

Reportedly, a million dollars of super PAC money poured into the 3rd, from Republicans, in support of a brazen Big Lie campaign to paint Walter Jones as a

Is Obama Right about War?

By Patrick Buchanan

"What Would America Fight For?"

That question shouts from the cover of this week's Economist. It is, asserts the magazine, "the question haunting its allies."

While most agree that America would fight to defend her treaty allies and to protect vital interests if imperiled, the question is raised by President Obama's reticence in Crimea, Ukraine and Syria.

Asked in Manila how he answers critics who say his foreign policy appears to be one of "weakness," the president, stung, replied

This Role of the US as Philanthropic Superpower is Simply Not Sustainable

By Patrick J. Buchanan

If a single word could sum up the goal of Barack Obama's Asia tour, it would be "reassurance."

Obama went to Tokyo to reassure Japan that, should China attempt to seize its Senkaku Islands, America will fight at her side.

He reassured Seoul of our commitment to defend South Korea.

He went to Manila to reassure the Filipinos, who threw our Navy out of Subic Bay at the end of the Cold War, that America will be there in any clash with Beijing in the South China Sea.

Yet, as Clyde Prestowitz writes in the Financial Times, while we are committed to go to war to defend all three countries if attacked, none of them is

"The Demonization of Putin is Not a Policy. It is an Alibi for the Absence of One."

By Patrick J. Buchanan

"Mr. Obama is focused on isolating President Vladimir V. Putin's Russia by cutting off its economic and political ties to the outside world ... and effectively making it a pariah state."

So wrote Peter Baker in Sunday's New York Times. Yet if history is any guide, this "pariah policy," even if adopted, will not long endure.

Three years after Khrushchev sent tanks into Hungary, he

Nationalism is the Natural Enemy of Empires, and It Seems on the Rise Almost Everywhere

By Patrick Buchanan

With Vladimir Putin having bloodlessly annexed Crimea and hinting that his army might cross the border to protect the Russians of East Ukraine, Washington is abuzz with talk of dispatching U.S. troops to Eastern Europe.

But unless we have lost our minds, we are not going to fight Russia over territory no president ever regarded as vital to us.

Indeed, should Putin annex Eastern and Southern Ukraine all the way to Odessa, he would simply be restoring to Russian rule what had belonged to her from Washington's inaugural in 1789 to George H. W. Bush's inaugural in 1989.

This is not an argument for ignoring Russia's conduct.

But it is an argument for assessing what is vital and what is not, what threatens us and what does not, and what is the real deterrent to any re-establishment of the Soviet Empire.

Before we start sending troops back to Europe, as we did 65 years ago under Harry Truman, let us ask ourselves: Was it really the U.S. Army, which never crossed the Elbe or engaged in battle with the Red Army, that brought down the Soviet Empire and dissolved the Soviet Union?

No. What liberated the nations of Eastern Europe and the USSR was the determined will of these peoples to be free to decide their own destinies and create, or re-create, nations based on their own history, language, culture and ethnic identity?

Nationalism brought down the empire. And Mikhail Gorbachev let these nations go because Russia was weary of maintaining a coercive empire and because Russia, too, wanted to be part of the free world.

While Putin may want the Russians of Ukraine and Belarus back inside a Greater Russia, does anyone think he wants Rumanians, Bulgarians, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs or Slovaks back under Moscow's rule?

Putin knows that his own popularity, near 80 percent, is due directly to his being seen as a nationalist willing to stand up to the Americans and their claim to be sole architects of the New World Order.

And it is nationalism, not a NATO full of freeloaders, that is America's great ally in this post-Cold War world.

It was nationalism that liberated the captive nations, broke apart the Soviet Union, split Czechoslovakia in two and divided Yugoslavia into seven countries.

Nationalism drove the Chechens to try to break from Moscow, the Abkhazians and South Ossetians to secede from Georgia, and the Crimeans to say good-bye to Kiev. And as nationalism tore apart the Soviet Empire and USSR, nationalism will prevent their recreation.

Should Putin invade and annex all of Ukraine, not just Crimea and the East where Russians are in a majority, his country would face the same resistance from occupied Western Ukraine Russia faces today in Dagestan, Ingushetia and Chechnya. Putin knows that.

But if Eastern Ukraine in the May election should indicate a will to secede and join Russia, or become a separate autonomous state, why would we automatically oppose that? Are we not ourselves the proud descendants of the secessionists of '76?

If we can view with diffidence the drive by Scotland to secede from England, Catalonia to secede from Spain, Venice to secede from Italy, and Flanders to secede from Belgium, why would the secession of the Donbass from Ukraine be a problem for us, if done democratically?

Nationalism is the natural enemy of empires, and it seems on the rise almost everywhere.

An assertion of Chinese nationalism — Beijing's claim to islands Japan has occupied for over a century — has caused a resurgence of a Japanese nationalism dormant since World War II. Japan's nationalist resurgence has caused a rise in anti-Japanese nationalism in Korea.

China's great adversary today is Asian nationalism.

India resents China's hold on territories taken in a war half a century ago and China's growing naval presence in the Indian Ocean.

China's claims in the South China Sea have revived anti-Chinese nationalism in Vietnam and the Philippines. In Western China, Uighurs have resorted to violence and even terror to break Xinjiang off from China, which they hope to convert into their own East Turkestan.

Kurdish nationalism, an ally of America in Desert Storm, is today a threat to the unity of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Elections for the European Parliament in May are almost certain to see gains for the Ukip in England, Marine Le Pen's National Front in France, Geert Wilders Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and other nationalist parties that have lately arisen across Europe.

These parties in a way echo Putin. Where he wants Ukraine to stay out of the EU, they want their countries to get out of the EU.

Secessionism and nationalism are growth stocks today. Centralization and globalization are yesterday.

A new world is coming. And while perhaps unwelcome news for the transnational elites championing such causes as climate change and battling global economic inequality, it is hard to see any great threat in all this to the true interests of the American people.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

COPYRIGHT 2014 CREATORS.COM

The American Imperium, the Last of the Great Western Empires, May be About to Come Down

By Patrick J. Buchanan

On our TV talk shows and op-ed pages, and in our think tanks here, there is rising alarm over events abroad. And President Obama is widely blamed for the perceived decline in worldwide respect for the United States.

Yet, still, one hears no clamor from Middle America for "Action This Day!" to alter the perception that America is in retreat.

If a single sentence could express the seeming indifference of the silent majority of Americans to what is going on abroad, it might be

This is How Democracy Works Now

By Patrick Buchanan

"There is a gay mafia," said Bill Maher, "if you cross them you do get whacked."

Maher, the host of HBO's "Real Time," was talking about the gay activists and their comrades who drove Brendan Eich out as CEO of Mozilla. Eich, who invented JavaScript and co-founded Mozilla in 1998, had been named chief executive in late March.

Instantly, he came under attack for having contributed $1,000 to Proposition 8, whereby a majority of Californians voted in 2008 to reinstate a ban on same-sex marriage. Prop 8 was backed by the Catholic Church, the Mormon Church and the black churches, and carried 70 percent of the African-American vote.

Though Eich apologized for any "pain" he had caused and pledged to promote equality for gays and lesbians at Mozilla, his plea for clemency failed to move his accusers. Too late. According to The Guardian, he quit after it was revealed that he had also contributed — "The horror, the horror!" — to

In the New Ideological Cold War, Whose Side is God on Now?

By Patrick Buchanan

In his Kremlin defense of Russia's annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin, even before he began listing the battles where Russian blood had been shed on Crimean soil, spoke of an older deeper bond.

Crimea, said Putin, "is the location of

INCREDIBLE The War Party Oligarch that Has Presidential Hopefuls Groveling

By Patrick Buchanan

Is the Republican Party's Middle East policy up for bid?

For four days ending Sunday, a quartet of presidential hopefuls trooped to Las Vegas to attend the

What Would You Do If You Were in Putin's Shoes?

By Patrick Buchanan

As the old saying goes, you cannot truly understand a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes.

Perhaps Americans, a fortunate tribe, should try to see the world from the vantage point of the Russian people and Vladimir Putin, and, as the poet Robert Burns said, "see ourselves as others see us."

At 35, Putin was

Herbert Hoover's Secret History of FDR and Pearl Harbor

By Patrick Buchanan

On Dec. 8, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt took the rostrum before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war on Japan.

A day earlier, at dawn, carrier-based Japanese aircraft had launched a sneak attack devastating the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Said ex-President Herbert Hoover, Republican statesman of the day, “We have only one job to do now, and that is to defeat Japan.”

But to friends, “the Chief” sent another message: “You and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bit.”

Today, 70 years after Pearl Harbor, a remarkable secret history, written from 1943 to 1963, has come to light. It is Hoover’s explanation of what happened before, during and after the world war that may prove yet the death knell of the West.