Book Write-Ups: Where's the Birth Certificate?, Killing the Deep State, America for Sale (Jerome R. Corsi)

A. Jerome R. Corsi. Where's the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to Be President. WND Books, 2011.

This is a "birther" book, one that questions that Barack Obama was a natural-born citizen of the United States and thus his constitutional eligibility to be President. According to common law, which forms the context of the U.S. Constitution, a natural-born citizen is not merely a person who was born on American soil; children of foreign diplomats and Native Americans were born on American soil, but that did not make them natural-born citizens. A natural-born citizen is one whose parents, both of them, are natural-born U.S. citizens. The purpose of this law is to ensure that the President's loyalty is to the United States, not another country. Even if Barack Obama had been born in Hawaii, Corsi contends, he fails to qualify as a natural-born citizen because his father was not a natural-born citizen. That said, there are reasons to question whether Obama even was born in Hawaii. Those birth announcements in the Hawaiian newspapers after he was born inaccurately list the home of his grandparents as the home of his parents, so his grandparents may have placed the announcements in the newspapers so Obama would be considered a U.S. citizen; they recognized the advantages that Obama would have as a U.S. citizen. One of his Kenyan relatives claims she saw Obama's birth in Kenya, notwithstanding attempts to distort what she said. Obama, prior to this book, spent large sums of money against attempts to get him to release his long-form birth certificate, and one election official in Hawaii, with access to records and who lacks anti-Obama animus, expressed doubt that Obama even had a long-form birth certificate. This book raises interesting questions and is well-documented, though it could have done a better job explaining the inconsistencies it cites about Obama's birth and Obama's own narrative. For instance, Corsi notes documentation about two different Hawaiian hospitals purported to be the places of Obama's birth, but he did not explain how and why this inconsistency came to be.

B. Jerome R. Corsi. Killing the Deep State: The Fight to Save President Trump. Humanix, 2018.

Compared to Where's the Birth Certificate, this book was a disappointment. The national security apparatus's disdain for President Trump is well-known and documented. Corsi did not fully explain the reasons for its disdain: he mentions globalism and its commitment to a new world order but fails to flesh this out. However, he has another book, America for Sale, which is specifically about the new world order. People can still learn from this book. Corsi highlights shady things in which Robert Mueller was involved, but those sections are rather dense. Corsi also argues that the hacking of the Democrats during the 2016 election took place, not from Russia, but from within the U.S., and he contends that Seth Rich had something to do with that.

C. Jerome R. Corsi. America for Sale: Fighting the New World Order, Surviving a Global Depression, and Preserving USA Sovereignty. Threshold Editions, 2009.

I decided to read this book because I was curious about Corsi’s view on the new world order, since he argued in Killing the Deep State that the deep state was intent on preserving the new world order against President Trump’s attacks on it. What is this new world order, and how and why does the deep state support it? I thought this book would provide more context on that question.

America for Sale does not answer how and why the deep state supports the new world order, but it does discuss the topic of the new world order. Here are some thoughts, observations, and reactions.

---When I was in junior high school, I was reading Bircher-like material, which argued that there is an elite that is trying to create a one-world government, or “new world order.” When President George H.W. Bush proclaimed the virtues of a “new world order” during the first Gulf War, I, and others, thought that he meant a one-world government. In my English class, I was assigned to write an editorial, and I chose to write a critique of the new world order and the conspiracy to create it. My teacher, a liberal Democrat, thought that I was misunderstanding the term. She said that the new world order refers, not to a one-world government, but rather to municipal trade agreements. “Now, if you want to argue that those could lead to a one-world government, that is fine,” she continued, “but new world order itself does not mean a one-world government.”

I was thinking of that conversation when reading this book, for Corsi’s claims, on some level, are rather modest. Corsi talks about multinational corporations and free trade, and he thinks that could lead to a one-world government. There is a push for greater economic union within North America, and some prominent people have even expressed a desire that a North American Union could function like the European Union: countries exist, yet they are subject to certain transnational regulations from the Union of which they are a part. Corsi speculates that this could lead to a one-world government, as the European Union and the North American Union are integrated with each other. Meanwhile, the collapse of the American economy and dollar may encourage Americans to surrender their national sovereignty for economic survival.

---Corsi praises the Tea Party movement in this book, and his economic views overlap with economic libertarianism. At the same time, this book does stray from your typical right-wing Republican piece. First of all, Corsi spreads the blame for the 2008 financial crisis to both political parties. Both political parties supported deregulation of the banking industry, and both encouraged home loans to risky people. Second, like Bernie Sanders, Corsi criticizes income inequality, in which a tiny percentage owns most of the wealth in the U.S. Third, Corsi is critical of public-private partnerships and selling public assets, like toll roads, to private interests. According to Corsi, this often results in foreign companies owning a piece of America, which places American national security on shaky ground. Fourth, Corsi documents that one reason that some economic interests favor more globalism is that they do not care for the government regulation from particular states; they want less government regulation on themselves and thus a body above nation-states that has that. Corsi also discusses left-wing motivations behind globalism (i.e., humanitarianism), but there are also right-wing motivations. Fifth, in offering suggestions as to how to cope with the coming economic depression, Corsi recommends that different generations live together, young with old. This differs from the “move out of the house” rhetoric I hear from some conservatives. Finally, Corsi depicts Hugo Chavez, who is reviled by conservatives for being a socialist, as an opponent of the New World Order, since Chavez was against the North American Union.

---Corsi talks about loose currency and how that leads to inflation, yet he also tries to account for why it has not yet led to hyper-inflation. One reason is the influx of cheap goods as a result of free trade. Another reason relates to other countries holding our debt. (I remember during George W. Bush’s Presidency when Democrat Paul Begala was criticizing Bush for selling the national debt to China, saying that gives China control. I wonder what the latest on that is.) Were countries to lose confidence in the U.S. and the dollar, Corsi argues, they might drop our money like flies, and hyper-inflation would result.