The committee to "Reclaim American Liberty" recently completed a  symposium co-sponsored by the Hudson Institute, Human Events and the Family Security Foundation, which occurred on January 13th at The Union League Club in NYC. For a report on the conference from someone in attendance, click here.

The symposium featured three terrific panels and speakers on the 1) economy, 2) national security/foreign policy and 3) threats to our sovereignty.  For an overview of these three subject areas view the Addendum below and click here for a list of the speakers.

The core reason for the day was to provide a forum for information and leadership on America's most pressing problems, to be followed with the creation of consumer products such as monographs, pamphlets and books, based on what is said at the symposium. 

We are building a grassroots coalition of organizations that will distribute our symposium products to their members to provide them with the information and confidence they'll need to continue to confront and challenge their legislators on the policies coming out of Washington. This educational grassroots project will reach out nationally to every state in the union to make this a massive, united effort to reclaim American liberties. The goal is to inform and change the political landscape. We are planning to ride the crest of Americans’ new-found passions for the preservation of our country, and to supply them with guidance from our country’s best thinkers to accomplish that. 

We are targeting 50 large grassroots organizations to become part of our team. Examples of some of the grassroots team so far are Concerned Women for America, Conservatives.com (a Heritage Foundation/Washington Times project), The American Conservative Union, As a Mom (55,000 members), Homemakers for America, Eagle Forum, the Young America’s Foundation, the State Policy Network, National Federation of Independent Businesses, Christian Action Network, Move America Forward, Taxpayers for Common Sense and many more.

Check back here regularly for updates on this effort.
 
 

Addendum

Economy – The first area of focus is on our economic security.  We have been on an unsustainable spending path for quite some time, greatly accelerated by the current political leadership.  The threat posed to our future generations by the rate of spending in which we have engaged must be stopped.

In addition to over-spending, our tax and regulatory policiesincreasingly make U.S. companies uncompetitive in the global marketplace, so many are relocating overseas, which will hinder our ability to compete in the 21st Century.  Further, with our government confiscating so much of the wealth we earn, both our standard of living and our ability to govern ourselves are greatly diminished. 

Our current economic difficulties will not be solved by a big government-directed solution to all of our problems.  With the expansion of the role of government comes more spending, higher taxes and more burdensome regulations, and this process must be reversed.

Foreign Policy/National Defense  -  In addition to the rise of Communist China and a resurgent Nationalism in Russia, we face a serious security threat from Jihadism, including a nuclear-armed Iran as a part of Jihadism, as well as narco-terrorism from south of the border.

The problem of Jihadism is a particular interest as it is so widespread, with terrorist Training cells right here in the U.S.  (See New York City Police Department’s Report by their Intelligence Analysts entitled: “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat”)

Jihadism is not confined to the violent variety, but includes “Cultural Jihad”.  The latter is an attempt to subvert our institutions from within, with the goal of changing our system of government from a constitutional Republic to an Islamic State. 

Regaining our Sovereignty – The issue of sovereignty covers three areas.  They are national sovereignty, state and local sovereignty and personal, or individual sovereignty.

The problem of national sovereignty stems from a notion that has become prevalent in the 20th Century that global problems require global solutions.  In practice this often means surrendering our national sovereignty bit by bit, to international organizations as various treaties are signed to address the myriad of real or perceived “global problems”.  For a more detailed analysis of this problem consult U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton’s April 2009 speech to the Stanford Law School entitled “The Coming War on Sovereignty”.  A similar case can be made for state and local authority, or what we refer to as “federalism”.   Local authority gives way to state control and state authority gives way to federal control as we seek a centralized government solution to more and more of our problems. 

Finally, there is the issue of personal sovereignty.  This is related to our capacity for self-governance.  The failure of our schools to teach our founding principles is a big reason why we have a population of citizens who do not have a firm understanding of what it means to be a sovereign citizen.  Another related problem is the neglect of teaching a common language.  Mastery of the English language is one of the key factors by which new immigrants become prosperous citizens.  We are a nation of immigrants and our national motto is E pluribus unum, which is Latin for "Out of many one".  It is obvious what constitutes the “many” in this motto, but what constitutes the “one”?  It is a common set of values and a common language that allows diverse people from “many” racial, religious and ethnic backgrounds to form “one” nation and culture.

Economic Panel

Moderator: Herb London - Herbert I. London is president of the Hudson Institute, a world renowned think-tank in Washington DC. He is professor emeritus and the former John M. Olin Professor of Humanities at New York University. And he was responsible for creating the Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 1972 and was its dean until 1992. This school was organized to promote the study of "great books" and classic texts.

Herbert London is a graduate of Columbia University, 1960 and the recipient of a Ph.D. from New York University, 1966.

In 1989, Dr. London was one of the Republican candidates for Mayor of New York City. In 1990 he was the Conservative Party Candidate for Governor of New York garnering more votes than any third party candidate in the state's history. In 1994 he was the Republican Party candidate for New York State Comptroller losing in a close election.

Diane Furchtgoff-Roth - Diana Furchtgott-Roth is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, where she directs the Center for Employment Policy. Prior to joining Hudson, Ms. Furchtgott-Roth was Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor. From 2001 to 2002 she served as chief of staff at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Ms. Furchtgott-Roth is the editor of Overcoming Barriers to Entrepreneurship in the United States (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008) and the coauthor of The Feminist Dilemma: When Success Is Not Enough (AEI Press, 2001) and Women’s Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economics of Women in America (AEI Press, 1999). From 2006 to 2008 she was a weekly economics columnist for the New York Sun, and is now a contributing editor for RealClearMarkets.com and a columnist for Reuters.com. Her articles have been published in The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, The Los Angeles Times, and Le Figaro, among others.

Peter Morici (He wants to leave immediately after his panel ends) - Peter Morici is a Professor of International Business at the University of Maryland.  Previously, he served as Director of Economics at the U.S. International Trade Commission where he directed the agency's professional economists and provided international economic policy advice to the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees, U.S. Trade Representative, Council of Economic Advisors, and other government agencies.

Mr. Morici has advised many leading corporations and governments regarding trade and regulatory issues. He serves on the Bloomberg and Reuters macroeconomic forecasting panels — and has been featured on many media networks and newspapers.

Betsy McCaughey - McCaughey and her twin brother William, were born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the daughter and son of Albert Peterken, a janitor at a factory, and his wife, Ramona. The family moved around the Northeast before settling in Westport, Connecticut, where her father was a maintenance worker at a nail clipper factory, when she was six years old. McCaughey attended public schools in Westport through the 10th grade. For 11th and 12th grades, she attended the Mary A. Burnham School, a college preparatory boarding school in Northampton, Massachusetts ninety miles away from home, on a scholarship, graduating in 1966.

McCaughey then went on another scholarship to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she majored in history, wrote her senior thesis on Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville, won Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Lehman Fellowships, and graduated with a B.A. with distinction in 1970. A year after she graduated, her mother, an alcoholic, died of liver disease at the age of 42.

After Vassar, McCaughey went to graduate school at Columbia University in New York City to study history, earning a M.A. in 1972 and a Ph.D. in U.S. constitutional history in 1976.  Her Ph.D. dissertation on William Samuel Johnson was awarded the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Bancroft Dissertation Award for outstanding dissertation in American History (including biography), diplomacy, or international affairs, in 1976.  It was published as a book, From Loyalist to Founding Father: The Political Odyssey of William Samuel Johnson, byColumbia University Press in 1980.  She also contributed a chapter about William Samuel Johnson to William Fowler and Wallace Coyle's 1979 book, The American Revolution: Changing Perspectives.

Gary Wolfram - Gary Wolfram is the George Munson Professor of Political Economy at Hillsdale College and President of Hillsdale Policy Group, a consulting firm specializing in taxation and policy analysis. Currently, I serve as treasurer of the Board of Trustees of Lake Superior State University and previously served as chairman. I served as a member of Michigan’s State Board of Education from 1993 to 1999, was chairman of the Headlee Amendment Blue Ribbon Commission and have been a member of the Michigan Enterprise Zone Authority, the Michigan Strategic Fund Board and the Michigan State Housing Development Authority Board. My public policy experience includes serving as former Congressman Nick Smith’s Washington Office Chief of Staff, Michigan’s Deputy State Treasurer for Taxation and Economic Policy under Governor John Engler, and Senior Economist to the Republican Senate in Michigan. I graduated summa cum laude from the University of California at Santa Barbara. I received my Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley and have taught at several colleges and universities, including Mount Holyoke College, the University of Michigan and Washington State University. My publications include Towards a Free Society: An Introduction to Markets and the Political System, and several works on Michigan’s tax structure and other public policy issues. I was named Hillsdale College’s Professor of the Year for 2004. Michigan Runner Magazine also named me one of the top 25 runners in Michigan of the past 25 years.
 

National Security Panel

Moderator: Jed Babbin - Jed Babbin is the best-selling author of "Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are Worse than You Think" (Regnery 2004). He is a former Air Force officer who served as a deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration. 

Mr. Babbin is a contributing editor for the American Spectator Magazine. His weekly column, "Loose Canons," appears in The American Spectator Online. Mr. Babbin's expertise is in national security and foreign affairs. However, he also writes about legal matters and for The American Spectator's "Saloon" series on subjects such as single-barrel bourbon and fine cigars. 

Mr. Babbin is a military analyst and appears frequently on the Fox News Channel and MSNBC, on shows such as The O'Reilly Factor, Scarborough Country, and many others. He also often serves as a guest host on top-rated talk radio shows including Hugh Hewitt (Salem Radio Networj), John Batchelor Show (ABC Radio) and has also subbed for Laura Ingraham (TRN), Mark Larson (KOGO) and Greg Garrison (WIBC). He began substitute hosting for Lt. Col. Oliver North's "Common Sense Radio" program in the 1990s.Mr. Babbin wrote the novel, Legacy of Valor (Pentland Press, 2000). 

Mr. Babbin is a graduate of Stevens Institute of Technology (B.E. 1970), Cumberland School of Law (J.D. 1973) and the Georgetown University Law School (LL.M. 1978). 

Gordon Chang - Gordon G. Chang is the author of Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World, released by Random House in January 2006.  Showdown focuses on nuclear proliferation in general and the North Korean crisis in particular.  His first book is The Coming Collapse of China (Random House, August 2001). He is a columnist at Forbes.com.

He lived and worked in China and Hong Kong for almost two decades, most recently in Shanghai, as Counsel to the American law firm Paul Weiss and earlier in Hong Kong as Partner in the international law firm Baker & McKenzie. 

His writings on China and North Korea have appeared in The New York Times,The Wall Street Journal, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the International Herald Tribune, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, National Review, and Barron's. 

Andrew McCarthy - Andrew C. McCarthy is a former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He was most notable for leading the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others. The defendants were convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and planning a series of attacks against New York City landmarks.  He also contributed to the prosecutions of terrorists who bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, resigning from the Justice Department in 2003.

McCarthy is currently a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, serving as the director of the FDD's Center for Law and Counterterrorism. He has served as an attorney for Rudy Giuliani, and is also a conservative opinion columnist who writes for National Review and Commentary.

General Richard Myers - Retired U.S. Air Force General Richard B. Myers served as the 15th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – the U.S. military's highest ranking officer – from 2001 to 2005. In this capacity, he served as the principal military advisor to the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council. He previously served as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff where he was the Chairman of the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, Vice Chairman of the Defense Acquisition Board, and a member of the National Security Council Deputies Committee and the Nuclear Weapons Council.

Previously, Myers was Commander in Chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Space Command; Commander of the Air Force Space Command; and Department of Defense manager of space transportation system contingency support at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado. He earlier was Commander of the Pacific Air Forces, Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii; Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon; Commander of U.S. Forces Japan and 5th Air Force at Yokota Air Base, Japan; and held operational command and leadership positions in a variety of Air Force assignments. A command pilot, he has flown more than 4,100 hours in the T-33, C-37, C-21, F-4, F-15 and F-16 aircraft, including 600 combat hours in the F-4. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on November 9, 2005.

Lt. Col. Allen West - - Alan West is a retired Americanarmy officer who was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, currently resides in Florida with his wife Angela and his daughters Aubrey and Austen. He is a vocal African-American conservative. Alan served in Taji, Iraq as commander of the 2d Battalion 20th Field Artillery, 4th Infantry Division. In 2008 Allen West ran as a Republican candidate for Florida's 22nd congressional district against incumbent democrat Ron Klein. He lost in a closer than expected race. Allen has announced that he is running in 2010 for US Congressional District 22.
 

Keynote Speaker

JOHN BOLTON - John Bolton was installed as America's ambassador to the United Nations by President George W. Bush on 1 August 2005. Bolton earned a law degree from Yale in 1974 and spent seven years at the Washington law firm of Covington & Burling (1974-81) before accepting a post as general counsel for the U.S. Agency for International Development in 1981, at the beginning of the Ronald Reagan administration. Over the next two decades Bolton worked in a variety of federal posts in the administrations of Reagan and George Bush the elder; when Bush the younger took office in 2001, Bolton became Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. In March of 2005, Bush nominated Bolton to replace John Danforth at the United Nations, an organization Bolton had often criticized. The nomination failed to reach a confirmation vote in the Senate, with some senators troubled by reports that Bolton had bullied subordinates and possibly used his position to gather intelligence on perceived rivals in the federal government. Because of the controversy, Bolton became a familiar face in the news, easily recognized by his big, bushy mustache. Congress went into recess late that summer, Bush used a constitutional maneuver called a recess appointment to put Bolton in the job while Congress was away. The appointment was good until the end of the Congressional session in 2006. Bolton resigned his post in December of 2006.
 

Sovereignty Panel

Moderator: Midge Decter - Midge Decter is an author and editor whose essays and reviews have appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic, National Review, The New Republic, and The Weekly Standard. A regular contributor to Commentary, she is also the author of several books, the most recent being An Old Wife's Tale. She is a member of the board of the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Security Policy, First Things magazine of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, and the Clare Boothe Luce Fund, and she lectures widely on a variety of subjects, from the family to foreign policy. She lives in New York City with her husband, author Norman Podhoretz.

Joe Loconte - Joseph Loconte was the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society at the Heritage Foundation, where he examined the role of religious belief in strengthening democracy and reforming civil society.

Mr. Loconte previously served as deputy editor of Policy Review, where he wrote widely about religion and politics. He is especially interested in new models for church-state partnerships, efforts to protect religious liberty at home and abroad, international human rights, just war theory, and the relationship of Islam to democratic freedoms.

He is the editor of the book The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). His other book is Seducing the Samaritan: How Government Contracts Are Reshaping Social Services (Boston: Pioneer Institute, 1997), which documents the destructive impact of government funding on private charities. His most recent research studies include "The White House Initiative to Combat AIDS: Learning From Uganda" (published by the Heritage Foundation) and "Churches, Charity and Children: How Religious Organizations Are Reaching America’s At-Risk Kids," (published by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society). A monograph, God, Government and the Good Samaritan: The Promise and the Peril of the President’s Faith-Based Agenda, was published in 2002 by the Heritage Foundation.

Mike Mukasey - Mukasey attended the Ramaz School in Manhattan, graduating in 1959. His wife, Susan, was a teacher and headmistress of the lower school at Ramaz and both of their children (Marc and Jessica) attended the school.??

Mukasey graduated from Columbia University, where he was the op-ed page editor of the Columbia Daily Spectator, receiving his B.A. in 1963, and Yale Law School, receiving his LL.B. in 1967. He practiced law for 20 years in New York City, serving for four years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the federal prosecutor's office in which he worked with Rudolph Giuliani.

Claudia Rosett - Claudia Rosett is a journalist-in-residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and a former member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. She writes a bi-weekly column, "The Real World," for The Wall Street Journal Europe and OpinionJournal.com.

At the Journal, Ms. Rosett worked as books editor from 1984-86; as editorial page editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal from 1986-93; as a reporter and then bureau chief in the Journal's Moscow bureau from 1993-96; and as a member of the Journal’s editorial board in New York from 1997-2002.

In 2005, Ms. Rosett received the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism for her coverage of the United Nations. In 1990 she received an Overseas Press Club citation for excellence for her on-the-scene coverage of the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989. Ms. Rosett received a bachelor’s degree in English from Yale. She has a master’s in English from Columbia and a master’s in business administration from the University of Chicago.

Mark Steyn - Mark Steyn is the author of America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It, a New York Times bestseller and a Number One bestseller in Canada. His writing on politics, arts and culture can be read each week throughout much of the English-speaking world. Mark is also a visiting fellow of Hillsdale College, and a popular guest host on America's Number One radio show The Rush Limbaugh Program.  His holiday single with Jessica Martin reached Number Seven on Amazon's easy listening chart.

In the United States, his column appears in newspapers from The Washington Times to The Philadelphia Bulletin to The Orange County Register in California, as well as in Investors' Business Daily. In addition, Mark writes for The New Criterion, and serves as National Review's Happy Warrior. In Canada, he is a contributing editor to Maclean's, the Dominion's oldest and biggest-selling news weekly. Mark also appears in The Jerusalem Post, the Middle East's leading English-language daily; The Australian, Australia's national newspaper; Investigate and Hawke's Bay Today in New Zealand; and more occasionally in The Wall Street Journal and (translated into Italian) Il Foglio, but even when he's not in them he thinks they're worth reading, which is why we link to them here. Mark also chips in at The Corner and appears each week on The Hugh Hewitt Radio Show.