VDH - Why Does The Good Life End

A look Back
People just don’t disappear. Look at Germany in 1946 or Athenians in 339 B.C. They continue, but their governments and cultures end. Aside from the dramatic military implosions of authoritarian or tribal societies — the destruction of Tenochtitlan, the end of Nazism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the annexation of tribal Gaul — what brings consensual states to an end, or at least an end to the good life?
The city-states could not stop 30,000 Macedonians in a way — when far poorer and 150 year earlier — they had stopped 300,000 Persians descending on many of the same routes. The French Republic of 1939 had more tanks and troops on the Rhine than the Third Reich that was busy overrunning Poland. A poorer Britain fought differently at el-Alamein than it does now over Libya. A British battleship was once a sign of national pride; today a destroyer represents a billion pounds stolen from social services.
Give me
Redistribution of wealth rather than emphasis on its creation is surely a symptom of aging societies. Whether at Byzantium during the Nika Riots or in bread and circuses Rome, when the public expects government to provide security rather than the individual to become autonomous through a growing economy, then there grows a collective lethargy. I think that is the message of Juvenal’s savage satires about both mobs and the idle rich. Fourth-century Athenian literature is characterized by forensic law suits, as citizens sought to sue each other, or to sue the state for sustenance, or to fight over inheritances.
The subtext of Petronius’s Satyricon is an affluent, childless, often underemployed citizenry seeking inheritances and lampooning the productive classes that produce enough excess for the wily to get by just fine without working. Somewhere around 1985 in California I noticed that my students were hoping for a state job first, a federal job second, a municipal job third — and a private one last. Around 1990, suddenly two sorts of commercials were aired everywhere: how to join a law suit by calling a law firm’s 1-800 number or how to get a free power chair, scooter, or some other device by calling the 1-800 number of
a health care company that would do the paper work for Social Security on your behalf.
Regulate, not create
Why is it more moral for a federal bureaucrat in a state-supplied SUV to shut down an offshore oil rig on grounds that it is too dangerous for the environment than for a private individual to risk his own capital to find some sort of new fuel to power his government’s SUV fleet? All affluent societies believe that they are just too rich not to be able to afford another regulation, just one more moralizing indulgence, yet again an added entitlement. But as we see now in postmodern America, idle 250,000 acres of farmland for a tiny fish, shut down an entire oilfield, put off a new natural gas find in worry over possible environmental alteration, add a cent to the sales tax, mandate yet another prescription drug entitlement not funded, or offer yet another in-state tuition discount to an illegal alien — and the costs finally equate to an implosion as we see in Greece or California. And as we know from past collapses, a new entitlement in a matter of minutes becomes an institutionalized right whose withdrawal causes far more anguish than its prior nonexistence. Justinian learned that when he sought to cut the civil service and almost lost his throne.
Them
Not that the elite are exempt. Western moral literature, from Horace to Thackeray, focuses on the vanity of the rich who think that a greedy heir won’t really inherit their hard-won or suspect riches, or that their always aging hips and knees will always so briskly power them up the monumental stairs of their colossal homes, or that a fifth sailboat or another 1000 acres will at last end the boredom. But the rub is not whether they are rich but whether they are idle, whether they send a message that affluence can make life better, rather than affluence is inevitably corrupting. In Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars, the theme is not just imperial decadence and cruelty, but also the blind passions of the mob that the elite so cynically manipulate for their own useless privilege and nonsensical indulgence.
We are good and therefore can act badly
The outsourcing of private morality to the state is a particularly modern affliction, but equally as pernicious. We witness the startling paradox that today’s private society is crasser, less honest, and more uncouth even as its government’s official morality stresses gender, race, class, and green ethical superiority. But just because the state now thankfully mandates disabled parking spaces does not mean that we honor a crippled relative more than in the past, or that our children are more likely to write a note of thanks to a grandparent’s gift. I can surely see an erosion in the public expression of manners and morality even as I sense our government is now more “fair” and “equal” than ever before.
Just because the state will sue you for the appearance of sexual harassment does not mean that leaving your laptop in a college university carrel means it is less likely to be stolen than, say, a wallet in 1955. The frightening worry is that the two are connected: the more the state steps in to to assure that we are cosmically moral, the more we assume we can relax and therefore become concretely immoral. Detroit is a symptom of that transition from family to state definitions of morality. Go to Athens today, and one can read high-sounding praises of the all-encompassing welfare state, and see all around private machinations to get out of taxes and boasts about getting a public job that requires no work and earns lots of pay.
When poverty is defined as relative want rather than existential need, states decay and societies decline. In the fifth century, Athenians were content to be paid to go to the theater; by the fourth, they were paid also to vote — even as they hired mercenaries to fight and forgot who won at Salamis, and why. Flash mobbing did not hit bulk food stores. The looters organized on Facebook through laptops and cell phones, not through organizing during soup kitchens and bread lines. Random assaults were not because of elemental poverty, but anger at not having exactly what appears on TV.
Obesity, not malnutrition, is the affliction at Wal-Mart. In our strange culture, that someone drives an overpriced BMW apparently means that our own Toyotas don’t have air conditioners or stereos. But that John Edwards or John Kerry or Al Gore has a huge house doesn’t mean that mine is inadequate — or the tract homes that sprout in my community for new arrivals from Mexico are too small.
Of course, the elite have responsibility to use their largess wisely and not turn into the Kardashians. But that a fifth of one percent of the taxpayers are finding ways not to pay at the income tax rate on their large incomes does not hurt the republic as much as 50% of the population paying no income tax at all. The latter noble sorts do not bother us as much, but their noncompliance bothers the foundations of our society far more than that of the stingy, but minuscule, number of grasping rich.
Lala land
Unreality is an especially disturbing symptom. When Jimmy Hoffa threatens the non-unionists, one imagines that Detroit is building better, safer, more reliable cars at a better price and has for decades. When Barack Obama urges the Black Caucus to march for equality, and adopts the cadences and pose of a 1960 civil rights leader, one would think the right wing in Florida just picked Bull Connor, not Herman Cain, as their straw poll winner. When the third-generation, hip spokesman for La Raza talks about inequality, one would think she herself just crossed the border from Oaxaca, forced to flee a benevolent Mexico to work in the pits of an American Mordor.
Hope
We all know what will save us and what is destroying us. But the trick is to see how the two will collide. A new tax code, simple rates, few deductions, everybody pays something; new entitlement reform, less benefits, later retirement; a smaller government, a larger private sector; a different popular culture that honors character rather than excess — all that is not, and yet is, impossible to envision. It will only transpire when the cries of the self-interested anguished are ignored. My expectation is that soon that the affluent of suddenly rich China and India will come down with the Western disease that we see endemically in Europe and among our own, even as America snaps out of it, and recommits itself to self-reliance and wealth creation. But when I look at 18th-century Venice, or 1950s Britain, or France in 1935, or 3rd-century Athens, or 5th-century AD Rome, I am worried. I don’t think we wish to live in a quiet but collapsed Greece in the age of Plutarch, forever dreaming about a far off age of past accomplishment.

Getting on Right Sideof Solyndra Scandal - While Dems Still Can

Hot Air

Maybe it’s just me, but it certainly looks like there’s a whole lot of butt covering going on in Washington these days. Some of these folks appear to be positioning themselves to be on the right side of history before a bunch of questions begin coming up which include phrases like, “what did he know and when did he know it?”
It’s one thing to be unaware that all of this was going on, but as the old rule in politics teaches us, it’s always the coverup that gets you more than the actual deed. With Solyndra executives doing their best mobster imitation and taking the 5th, (perfectly legal, of course) they’re leaving the worst possible impression of the White House in the eyes of the public. If any of the President’s allies do anything at this point to give the impression that they’re hindering an investigation or facilitating a coverup, they could well find themselves having to fall on their swords later on. (Assuming that this turns out to be anywhere near as bad as it’s looking so far.)
But no matter the motivation, when we see members from both parties lining up to identify a potential problem and moving to vigorously investigate it, it’s a hopeful sign, no? Which brings us to our exit question: could this be one of those rare cases where they system actually *gasp* works? Naw… must just be my natural streak of optimism showing again. (/sarc)

Liberal BS - Class Warfare

Elizabeth Warren (BMB Leftist)

I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.
You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.
Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

 What I like about this is how unbothered it is by the question of what the factory owner’s fair share of taxes might be. The implication, clearly, is that no amount would ever be fair. “We” built an entire civic infrastructure around this factory, without which it couldn’t operate, so really the factory owner can never thank us enough. It’s a blank check for tax hikes unto eternity. In essence: “I helped pay for that sidewalk, now give me your wallet.” In fact, if you had no knowledge of American tax law while listening to this shpiel, you might reasonably conclude that “factory owners” pay no taxes at all. They’re complete free riders — using the roads, relying on the police, making bank off the backs of public-educated workers, and never offering so much as a thin dime to the system in gratitude. In reality, that factory owner is paying for more of that road, public school, and cop’s salary than you or I are. Beyond that, though, I’m amazed at how easily she overlooks the wealth created by the factory as a contribution to society. Not all of it ends up in the owner’s pocket, even though he/she assumed the massive risk of starting the plant. The factory provides jobs; it generates demand for suppliers; and if it’s successful it cranks out a product that others use to generate wealth of their own. And the more wealth there is, the easier it is to pay for those roads and cops and schools. Memo from factory owners to Warren: You’re welcome.


the sheer ingenious complexity of the scheme means they have trouble explaining it to the common voting yokel. Case in point: ObamaCare. The program’s obviously brilliant, but poor O had a devil of a time explaining why in those 500 speeches he gave on it. Warren has them buzzing because, if this clip is indicative, she has a knack for explaining how rich parasites are getting fat off The People in terms average voters might understand. I


Exit question: Does the social contract also require accountability with taxpayer money?

TS - Back to the Future

Back to the Future?

By Thomas Sowell

9/13/2011

 

Those who are impressed by words seem to think that President Barack Obama made a great speech to Congress last week. But, when you look beyond the rhetoric, what did he say that was fundamentally different from what he has been saying and doing all along?
Are we to continue doing the same kinds of things that have failed again and again, just because Obama delivers clever words with style and energy?
Once we get past the glowing rhetoric, what is the president proposing? More spending! Only the words have changed -- from "stimulus" to "jobs" and from "shovel-ready projects" to "jobs for construction workers."
If government spending were the answer, we would by now have a booming economy with plenty of jobs, after all the record trillions of dollars that have been poured down a bottomless pit. Are we to keep on doing the same things, just because those things have been repackaged in different words?
Or just because Obama now assures us that "everything in this bill will be paid for"? This is the same man who told us that he could provide health insurance to millions more people without increasing the cost.
When it comes to specific proposals, President Obama repeats the same kinds of things that have marked his past policies -- more government spending for the benefit of his political allies, the construction unions and the teachers' unions, and "thousands of transportation projects."
The fundamental fallacy in all of this is the notion that politicians can "grow the economy" by taking money out of the private sector and spending it wherever it is politically expedient to spend it -- so long as they call spending "investment."
Has Obama ever grown even a potted plant, much less a business, a bank, a hospital or any of the numerous other institutions whose decisions he wants to control and override? But he can talk glibly about growing the economy.
Arrogance is no substitute for experience. That is why the country is in the mess it is in now.
Obama says he wants "federal housing agencies" to "help more people refinance their mortgages." What does that amount to in practice, except having the taxpayers be forced to bail out people who bought homes they could not afford?
No doubt that is good politics, but it is lousy economics. When people pay the price of their own mistakes, that is when there is the greatest pressure to correct those mistakes. But when taxpayers who had nothing to do with those mistakes are forced to pay the costs, that is when those and other mistakes can continue to flourish -- and to mess up the economy.
Whatever his deficiencies in economics, Barack Obama is a master of politics -- including the great political game of "Heads I win and tails you lose."
Any policy that shows any sign of achieving its goals will of course be trumpeted across the land as a success. But, in the far more frequent cases where the policy fails or turns out to be counterproductive, the political response is: "Things would have been even worse without this policy."
It's heads I win and tails you lose.
Thus, when unemployment went up after the massive spending that was supposed to bring it down, we were told that unemployment would have been far worse if it had not been for that spending.
Are we really supposed to fall for ploys like this? The answer is clearly "yes," as far as Obama and his allies in the media are concerned.
Our intelligence was insulted even further in President Obama's speech to Congress, when he set up this straw man as what his critics believe -- that "the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody's money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they're on their own."
Have you heard anybody in any part of the political spectrum advocate that? If not, then why was the President of the United States saying such things, unless he thought we were fools enough to buy it -- and that the media would never call him on it?

Back to the Future: Part II

By Thomas Sowell

9/14/2011

 

Editor’s note: This article is Part II in a series. Click here to read Part I.
Some people are hoping that President Obama's plan will get the economy out of the doldrums and start providing jobs for the unemployed. Others are hoping that the Republicans' plan will do the trick.Those who are truly optimistic hope that Democrats and Republicans will both put aside their partisanship and do what is best for the country.
Almost nobody seems to be hoping that the government will leave the economy alone to recover on its own. Indeed, almost nobody seems at all interested in looking at the hard facts about what happens when the government leaves the economy alone, compared to what happens when politicians intervene.
The grand myth that has been taught to whole generations is that the government is "forced" to intervene in the economy when there is a downturn that leaves millions of people suffering. The classic example is the Great Depression of the 1930s.
What most people are unaware of is that there was no Great Depression until AFTER politicians started intervening in the economy.
There was a stock market crash in October 1929 and unemployment shot up to 9 percent -- for one month. Then unemployment started drifting back down until it was 6.3 percent in June 1930, when the first major federal intervention took place.
That was the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill, which more than a thousand economists across the country pleaded with Congress and President Hoover not to enact. But then, as now, politicians decided that they had to "do something."
Within 6 months, unemployment hit double digits. Then, as now, when "doing something" made things worse, many felt that the answer was to do something more.
Both President Hoover and President Roosevelt did more -- and more, and more. Unemployment remained in double digits for the entire remainder of the decade. Indeed, unemployment topped 20 percent and remained there for 35 months, stretching from the Hoover administration into the Roosevelt administration.
That is how the government was "forced" to intervene during the Great Depression. Intervention in the economy is like eating potato chips: You can't stop with just one.
What about the track record of doing nothing? For more than the first century and a half of this nation, that was essentially what the federal government did -- nothing. None of the downturns in all that time ever lasted as long as the Great Depression.
An economic downturn in 1920-21 sent unemployment up to 12 percent. President Warren Harding did nothing, except for cutting government spending. The economy quickly rebounded on its own.
In 1987, when the stock market declined more in one day than it had in any day in 1929, Ronald Reagan did nothing. There were outcries and outrage in the media. But Reagan still did nothing.
That downturn not only rebounded, it was followed by 20 years of economic growth, marked by low inflation and low unemployment.
The Obama administration's policies are very much like the policies of the Roosevelt administration during the 1930s. FDR not only smothered business with an unending stream of new regulations, he spent unprecedented sums of money, running up record deficits, despite raising taxes on high income earners to levels that confiscated well over half their earnings.
Like Obama today, FDR blamed the country's economic problems on his predecessor, making Hoover a pariah. Yet, 6 years after Hoover was gone, and nearly a decade after the stock market crash, unemployment hit 20 percent again in the spring of 1939.
Doing nothing may have a better track record in the economy but government intervention has a better political record in getting presidents re-elected.
People who say that Barack Obama cannot be re-elected with unemployment at its current level should take note that Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected a record four times, despite two consecutive terms in which unemployment was never as low as it is today.
Economic reality is one thing. But political impressions are something very different -- and all too often it is the political impressions which determine the fate of an administration and the fate of a nation.

Back to the Future: Part III

By Thomas Sowell

9/15/2011

 

Editor’s note: This article is Part III in a series. Click here to read Part I. Click here to read Part II.
Ninety years ago -- in 1921 -- federal income tax policies reached an absurdity that many people today seem to want to repeat. Those who believe in high taxes on "the rich" got their way. The tax rate on people in the top income bracket was 73 percent in 1921. On the other hand, the rich also got their way: They didn't actually pay those taxes.The number of people with taxable incomes of $300,000 a year and up -- equivalent to far more than a million dollars in today's money -- declined from more than a thousand people in 1916 to less than three hundred in 1921. Were the rich all going broke?
It might look that way. More than four-fifths of the total taxable income earned by people making $300,000 a year and up vanished into thin air. So did the tax revenues that the government hoped to collect with high tax rates on the top incomes.
What happened was no mystery to Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. He pointed out that vast amounts of money that might have been invested in the economy were instead being invested in tax-exempt securities, such as municipal bonds.
Secretary Mellon estimated that the amount of money invested in tax-exempt securities had nearly tripled in a decade. The amount of this money that the tax collector couldn't touch was larger than the federal government's annual budget and nearly half as large as the national debt. Big bucks went into hiding.
Mellon pointed out the absurdity of this situation: "It is incredible that a system of taxation which permits a man with an income of $1,000,000 a year to pay not one cent to the support of his Government should remain unaltered."
One of Mellon's first acts as Secretary of the Treasury was to ask Congress to end tax exemptions for municipal bonds and other securities. But Congress was not about to set off a political firestorm by doing that.
Mellon's Plan B was to cut the top income tax rate, in order to lure money out of tax-exempt securities and back into the economy, where increased economic activity would generate more tax revenue for the government. Congress also resisted this, using arguments that are virtually unchanged to this day, that these would just be "tax cuts for the rich."
What makes all this history so relevant today is that the same economic assumptions and political arguments which produced the absurdities of 1921 are still going strong in 2011.
If anything, "the rich" have far more options for putting their money beyond the reach of the tax collectors today than they had back in 1921. In addition to being able to put their money into tax-exempt securities, the rich today can easily send millions -- or billions -- of dollars to foreign countries, with the ease of electronic transfers in a globalized economy.
In other words, the genuinely rich are likely to be the least harmed by high tax rates in the top brackets. People who are looking for jobs are likely to be the most harmed, because they cannot equally easily transfer themselves overseas to take the jobs that are being created there by American investments that are fleeing from high tax rates at home.
Small businesses -- hardware stores, gas stations or restaurants for example -- are likewise unable to transfer themselves overseas. So they are far more likely to be unable to escape the higher tax rates that are supposedly being imposed on "millionaires and billionaires," as President Obama puts it. Moreover, small businesses are what create most of the new jobs.
Why then are so many politicians, journalists and others so gung-ho to raise tax rates in the upper brackets?
Aside from sheer ignorance of history and economics, class warfare politics pays off in votes for politicians who can depict their opponents as defenders of the rich and themselves as looking out for working people. It is a great political game that has paid off repeatedly in state, local and federal elections.
As for the 1920s, Mellon eventually got his way, getting Congress to bring the top tax rate down from 73 percent to 24 percent. Vast sums of money that had seemingly vanished into thin air suddenly reappeared in the economy, creating far more jobs and far more tax revenue for the government.
Sometimes sanity eventually prevails. But not always.

vdh -Gvmt. Lagrgesse

The California Corridor: Some Lessons on Government Largesse From the New Frontier

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On September 12, 2011 @ 7:16 am In Uncategorized | 219 Comments

The Great Warpath
This summer it has been a softer, modern version of living in a cabin on the Great Warpath circa 1740 near Albany or Montreal (in this regard, take a look at Eliot Cohen’s new book Conquered into Liberty on the origins of the American way of war), readying oneself for the next break-in — so our inland “California Corridor” has become from Bakersfield to Sacramento.
More specifically, I have been on the lookout around my farm for a predatory, nearly new, grey/silver Toyota truck that drives in and then speeds out — always a day or so before the nocturnal theft. He’s clever, this caser — and audacious too, like a wily Sherman tank prowling through the hedgerows. (Why, if poor, is he not home growing a tomato garden or scouring the roadside for the ubiquitous tossed aluminum cans and plastic bottles?)
On three separate occasions from June to August, I have had copper wire stripped out of pumps, the barn ransacked, and the two locks pried off the shop and various things stolen. (Why did they steal buckets of 1900 antique bolts and square nails and leave alone a drill press and grinder? Ease of recycling? Ignorance?)
When Metal Grows Legs
One of the stranger things in the California Corridor is to periodically walk around a barnyard and notice: “Hmm, that set of rusted furrowers is gone? Hmmm, what happened to those sections of 2-inch pipe? Hmmm, didn’t I have an old compressor next to the shed? Have I got dementia, or wasn’t there once upon a time three metal ladders leaning against the shop?” It is as if they became animate, grew legs, and quietly walked off in the sunset.
Hippo Regius
Twice I ran into the barnyard to see the truck, with its two gangbanger youths, peel off in clouds of dust. (And, yes, as a CSU ex-professor, I know the party line: the dominant culture neglects/exploits/oppresses/fill in the blanks the “other” to such a degree that he sometimes must lash out, or, on occasion, to find validation, might just do something illegal like steal buckets of antique nails, or illogical, like in poverty buying a new truck, and thus so disturbs/finally wins the attention of those with privilege and their self-constructed norms. Been there and heard that for thirty years).
The Toyota is always around when theft occurs, and always speeding off when anyone spots it. Rural California is also like North Africa circa 420 AD: the few family farms left are mostly fenced or walled, the dogs large, the owners armed — trying to survive against organized Vandal attacks. All we need are mosaics in the courtyard portraying happier times as a testament to future archeologists. Maybe a “Cave Canem!” on the doorstep.
I know of no neighboring farm that has not been broken into or fought/scared off such intruders. (The urban counterpart in our town are a few municipal workers stealing their own city manhole covers; two ex-policemen, like rogue legionaries, now up on felony charges; or Gothic-like gangs, prying off all the bronze dedicatory plaques from the hallowed buildings. Perhaps they are similar to the bullet-hungry occupying Ottomans in 16th-century Greece, destroying classical temples and shrines to find and melt down the lead seals over metal block clamps — on the theory that someone 2,000 years earlier knew a lot more about making lead than did they, or maybe impoverished Greeks around 1850 finishing up the destruction of antiquity by fracting and melting down the scattered marble blocks for lime whitewash.)
Then and Now
So it is that in 1935 poor people scraped and saved to cast a bronze plaque for their Depression-era new city hall, and in 2011 rather more affluent people ripped it off to melt it down for a layaway payment on some chrome rims or another round of meth.
Civilization ends when the pampered beneficiaries of the hard work of the now dead have the luxury of ignoring how hard it was — and is — to build shelter from the elements, to erect public buildings from scrub, to grow food and sprout farms from sage. Our contemporary criminals are protected from the elemental struggle and so have the indulgence to gnaw away at civilization’s veneer — and we, in our conspiratorial silence about them, likewise forgot that to keep still about the destruction of the work of others is to be complicit in it.
Jaws on Wheels
Seven days ago, I left to teach here at Hillsdale for my month vacation. My son, back home on the farm — he often rushes out armed when trucks come into the driveway at night — called. He mentioned in passing that the Toyota was back, Jaws-like circling around the farm in short bursts of speed to see if anyone was there. (The modus operandi in the rural California hinterlands is to drive into a farm, check if anyone comes out, if so, either peel out or even stay put to “inquire” about a “rental” or “work.” If no one comes out, then break a window, grab a TV or computer and speed off. Also: Please do not suggest, “call the sheriff”; I have and even “filled out a report” over the phone, no less. Enough said. And yes, I probably should sell the 140-year-old farm and move away, but also probably won’t. Why leave and give in to barbarism? There are still far more good than lawless people in the valley.)
Stealing Up For a Truck?
My point in this long excursus? Note the description “late-model Toyota.” I think it is a Tacoma, maybe 2009-11, so not a cheap truck by any means.
Earlier another youth drove in without seeing me mowing the lawn. I ran up; startled he stammered, “Hey, mister, I’m only looking for scrap metal to buy.” (What is it with the national epidemic with good wire or scrap metal?)
I’ll pass on his shoulder to finger sleeve tattoos, the ink drops under the eyes, the shaved head, wife-beater T-shirt, the inked-in but impressive religious icon tattooed on the neck, and the whole nine yards. As I wrote earlier, I immediately noticed brand new hot-water tanks, still in their labeled cardboard containers, in the bed of his truck. They seemed very “metal” to me, but not very “scrap.” Words were exchanged and he backed out.
Here’s the point: he too drove a brand new truck, this one a custom-painted fire-engine red Dodge, hopped up, with an expensive stereo blaring.
Chrome-rimmed Poverty?
Where are we going with this?
Yes, I confess once more to the same destination as the flash mobs and the London riots. What we think in the West now as too little is far too much. Both these thieves could trade in their multi-thousand-dollar trucks for cash to buy food, rather than steal the property of others and cause mayhem to make their payments. Heck, the rims alone are worth $1000.
(Thieves and gangbangers create a climate of general fear; they ruin the sense of tranquility, and they betray 150 years of collective labor of the now dead to create civilization from near nothing. Shame on them. Americans should not need to have armored rural mail boxes.) To suggest that they could do without the trucks or go without the dole, is not — channeling the president’s most recent speech warning against anti-government zealots — the same as wanting children to suffer from mercury poisoning or to render us helpless against the health care industry or to destroy government and want to start over from scratch.
More Federal Cash to the Rescue
So it is too with the federal government. In 2008 the housing market collapsed due to Wall Street speculation in sub-prime paper, dishonest banks, and real estate agents pushing mortgages and houses, and to be fair, either stupid or greedy unqualified house buyers who, late to a doomed game of musical chairs, thought even they, as the music ended, could find cheap loans, buy a home, earn thousands in instant “equity,” borrow against it, and get “free” cash.
But the glue that held the entire amorphous mess together were federally-guaranteed loans backed by Freddie and Fannie, agencies that were guided by congressional politics and not market worries — and themselves skimmed by incompetent bureaucrats who ended up millionaires. Take away those multibillion-dollar guarantors, and the market would have precluded the unqualified, the Wall Street roguery would have been neutered, and the inevitable housing bust would have been serious rather than catastrophic.
They Borrowed All For Us
Then there was George Bush’s 2008 multitrillion-dollar “stimulus” that “saved” the country, but destroyed the real progress he had made from 2006 to 2008 in addressing mounting debt. Then there was Barack Obama’s “second” $800 million “shovel-ready” stimulus. Now, of course, discredited Keynesians post facto decry its timid minuteness — but go back to January 2009 and read the op-eds. Then there was ebullition that Obama had taken the big dare and gone “big.” Only spending of that magnitude, we were lectured, would save us — as in funding “millions of green jobs” and “investments” and “infrastructure.” It was a weird time of Van Jones’ fakery, and preachy assurances/warnings from Geithner, Goolsbee, Orszag, Romer, and Summers. Pelosi et al. were even bragging that there was no need to read the vast borrowing bills before they were passed.
Money, Money Everywhere — and Not a Drop of Prosperity
We know that, like the first stimulus, the second went into the hands of those who were pretty well off; if banks and Wall Street profited the first time from conservative largesse, the second left-wing version enriched pseudo-green soon-to-be-bankrupt companies, pension funds, municipal and state employees, unions, and environmental bureaucracies.
Now we are supposed to be saved by Stimulus III. At nearly $500 billion in a single year, it may prove the largest single year payout in history. And we are assured it will not go to Wall Street, big banks, green companies, broke city and state governments, and “shovel ready” projects, but instead be “invested” in “work” programs fixing “infrastructure.” (Note the president no longer can use words and phrases like “shovel ready,” “green jobs,” or “stimulus”; they have all gone the way of sermons on “civility.”)
But does anyone dare imagine that what got us into this mess in 2008 and kept us stuck through 2011 are these huge federal programs that distort market forces while piling up trillions of dollars in debt, destroying rather than enhancing personal initiative? Both employers and workers are losing incentives, the former better off are ossified in fear of losing something, the latter worse off calcified in assurances of getting something.
Subsidizing Stasis
Maybe it is a fine and noble thing that the Obama administration vastly extended unemployment insurance. And, bravo, that nearly 50 million are now on food stamps. But a tragic voice from the past warns us that the more we diminish human incentives and guarantee a sort of cushioned permanent poverty, two things result: one, fewer people scramble to find productive work; and, two, envy sharpens as they begin to turn on their benefactors as being cheap, or mean-spirited in never giving quite enough to ensure parity with “them.” A cherry-red new truck or silver Toyota is never quite what others might have.
Epitaph
The problem with those who invaded my farm this summer was not poverty, but too much — at least in the sense of driving late-model trucks as they sought to destroy the lives and tranquility of others to get things that, by the very fact of their mode of transportation, they did not need. For the last two years, I have witnessed two constants: late-model cars in the valley shopping centers, an epidemic of obesity apparent to the naked eye, majorities on plastic food stamp debt cards, without apparent work in mid-morning, and a general unhappiness in the check-out lines that the government, state, city, etc. is not doing enough for them. All that is coupled with a media message of a cruel, heartless society that needs to do more for its oppressed — and a popular culture that damns any so witless and heartless for pointing the contradictions out.
Welfare on Top and Bottom
The welfare state, aside from being broke, is eroding initiative and warping reality — both for the elite at the top, like the executives who just milked a half-trillion dollars in sweetheart loans from some idiotic “green” bureaucrat, to the late-model truck drivers robbing productive farms to pay for their stereos and hydraulic-lifters.
So when the president speaks of “millions of green jobs” and “bringing jobs home,” I worry.
You see, I wish it were true, but I have doubts. I can imagine an employer offering to open a new state-of-the-art plant, but I fear only for millions in guaranteed federal loans, to be justified on some faddish green or “put people first” con.
Then I see someone like “sons of bitches” Jimmy Hoffa, or the Seattle longshoremen, or an NLRB plant-shutting academic nincompoop entering the picture to “have labor do its part.” And I don’t know what we are going to do to get those working, like the late-model truck-driving thieves — would such idle promise to be innovative, show up on time, be honest and disciplined, be familiar with written blueprints and warnings about their lathes and grinders, and be more productive than their competitors overseas?
And so I ask myself: “Is all this more efficient, more productive that what the Chinese offer?” “Will our solar panel or drill press be better built and at a cheaper cost and more durable?” “Have we justified our standard of living that allows us to slack while others toil?” “Is there a limit to the borrowed subsidies?” “How many engineers, brain surgeons, and savvy mechanics is California — near last in its high school test scores — producing that are better than those found elsewhere?”
Reality Cannot Be Reinvented
The tragic voice now shouts, not whispers: “Of course, this is not sustainable, you idiot! You must put real hope of profit and greater fear of loss into the employer who is freed to sink or swim on his own, a sense of challenge in the heart of the scrambling workers, and end the subsidies that allow someone to steal as a pastime to custom paint his truck cherry red and lift his truck bed up and down with a button, while the government gives him cash for his food and shelter.”
We are in a weird predicament where too much is not enough and the medicine is worse than the malady — and saying just that earns one ridicule.
It is not Barack Obama’s fault; he is a mere totem, just the overdue dividend of our long ago collective investment.
Again, if he didn’t exist, we would have to invent him.

C-P The Why behind GunWalker

Cloward-Piven: The Ultimate Goal of Gunwalker?

Posted By Bob Owens On September 17, 2011 @ 12:00 am In Uncategorized | 57 Comments

PJMedia reader “eon” posted an insightful comment ^[1] in response to my September 15 article ^[2] on the Gunwalker scandal:

To the best of my knowledge, no previous U.S. administration has ever destabilized the government of a putatively friendly foreign power purely for domestic political gain.
The closest you can get would be the revolutionary movement in what is now Panama, that the U.S. nurtured to gain that area’s independence (from Nicaragua) — to facilitate building the Panama Canal. But that was a pre-existing revolutionary movement with pre-existing complaints against the Nicaraguan government that did not include stopping them from selling illegal drugs. (Editor’s note: Panama gained its independence from Colombia, not Nicaragua.)
The gains Obama & Co. seem to be seeking come in three flavors. Ranked in order of time-criticality from their POV, they are most likely:
1. Short-term: Increased illegal immigration from Mexico as people attempt to flee the increasing violence (allowing them to push the DREAM Act through, and “stacking the deck” in the next election via ACORN and SEIU);
2. Medium-term: Propaganda for tighter gun laws (possibly enacted by Executive Order, bypassing the Congress);
3. Long-term: Legalization of “recreational drugs,” helped by a “drug friendly” Mexican government, influenced by if not overtly controlled by the drug cartels.
I strongly suspect that (3) is the ultimate objective, with (1) and (2) being seen (at least by Obama & Co.) as “stepping-stones” to attaining it.

While I personally think (3) is a non-starter even as a long-term issue, investigators and pundits closely tracking Gunwalker have long suspected a larger game was afoot.
A high-risk plot involving major elements of the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Treasury, and State, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Border Patrol, and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division (IRS-CID), requiring approval from the State Department, isn’t something that comes from a mid-level bureaucrat. It is typically incited and decided by the very highest levels of appointed and elected officials.
As anyone with any experience in government will attest, there is massive institutional inertia against both change and risk. It is insurmountable without significant stakeholder support. In government, this means directors, secretaries, and elected officeholders.
An operation like Fast and Furious would have been jettisoned in the conceptual stages as inherently dangerous and assured of failure, as various veteran law enforcement officers have attested (including here ^[3] at PJMedia in an article by LAPD veteran “Jack Dunphy”):

I can appreciate the desire to use novel law enforcement approaches in confronting the violence attendant to drug trafficking in Mexico. Someone, displaying a bit of that outside-the-box thinking, came up with the idea of allowing thousands of weapons to be bought on this side of the border with the idea that they could be tracked as they made their way through the network of cartel members and facilitators and into the hands of Mexican outlaws.
This was a pipe dream. To me, it is inconceivable that this operation ever made it out of the first meeting where it was discussed. It goes to show how detached police executives can be from the reality of police work as it is actually practiced. There is simply no effective way to track a gun once it leaves the store where it was purchased.

We’ve long suspected that what “eon” calls a “medium-term” goal — propaganda for tighter gun laws — was the ultimate goal of Gunwalker, but the plot makes significantly more sense if Gunwalker did have multiple goals, of which gun control was just one.
A logical speculation posted by “eon” is that the short-term goal of Gunwalker was to increase violence in Mexico. This would drive more Mexican citizens northward as illegal aliens, seeking respite from the violence in their home country. Their plight would provide the administration a way to pitch the DREAM Act ^[4] as an act of kindness to political refugees and another step towards amnesty.
This would be a strategy straight from the Cloward-Piven ^[5] playbook.
As James Simpson noted several months ago at American Thinker, the Cloward-Pieven strategy is always approached the same way ^[6]:

1. The offensive organizes previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits but not currently receiving all they can.
2. The offensive seeks to identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits.
3. The overarching aim is always to impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.

Gunwalker purposefully increases social unrest (increased gun violence/destabilizing Mexico), with the possible result of overloading the U.S. public welfare system (more illegal aliens fleeing the violence in Mexico and Central America). Gunwalker’s perpetrators could then use that influx to create an insurmountable constituency of poor seeking handouts from the Democratic Party. The hope of the strategy is to force a system-wide collapse of the current system, and then to rebuild the government in a variant of the strongest socialist model they think the public will accept.
It sounds too devious. It appears to fit.
Take Operation Fast and Furious in Arizona, the two suspected operations in Texas, Operation Castaway in Tampa, and the newer allegations of “Gangwalker” in the Midwest — they make sense only in the larger context of a Cloward-Piven framework.
These operations could not possibly succeed at interdicting straw purchasers, smugglers, and cartel bosses. No one actually involved in law enforcement could possibly believe that such idiotic operations could work. But these operations are logical when viewed through the context of their implementation as tactical applications designed to support a Cloward-Piven strategy.
Operation Castaway provided weapons to destabilize Central American countries and to help keep the cartel drug supply lines from Central and South America open. The unnamed gunwalking operations in Texas provided a steady flow of U.S. firearms to southern and central Mexico. Operation Fast and Furious provided the Sinaloa cartel more than 2,020 weapons in northern Mexico along the U.S. border. And to make sure the cartel wars didn’t get too one-sided, the State Department made sure the bloodthirsty Zetas were armed with American military equipment by selling them military hardware through a transparent front company ^[7].
The violence in Mexico triggered by the administration’s gunwalking efforts also seems logically designed to reverse a trend ^[8] that had begun of Mexicans and others originating from south of the border leaving the United States because of our current economic situation.
If the net flow of illegal aliens is negative, the Democratic Party’s desires are inhibited: increasing numbers of illegal aliens can create the sort of economic crisis they need to force amnesty laws, to assure a long-term Democratic majority, and to establish lock-step control over Hispanic voters as they have established over blacks.
Operation Fast and Furious doesn’t make sense as a anti-cartel operation, but it makes perfect tactical sense as a way of implementing Cloward-Piven, something that President Obama, Attorney General Holder, Secretary Napolitano, and Secretary Clinton have long embraced as followers of those radicals and Saul Alinsky. Gunwalker is the start of a coup d’état against the republic by the very souls entrusted to guard it.
Of course, this is entirely speculation at this point. It’s just damn hard to think of a more logical reason for Gunwalker to exist.

---

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

obama / hitler

BurntHills

Posted on September 16, 2011 at 11:53am in America’s case, the references to the exact parallels between obama and hitler [even parts of their childhod bios] are appropriate.
thru History only hitler ALSO wrote two books on how wonfderful he though the was, before he was Anybody. hitler also had his own personal logo designed to represent him at a glance, stood in front of grecian columns as he basked in the adulation of the mindless amsses, and hitler also despised the German flag and constitution, both of which he discarded as soon as he could. and hitler used the unions to his advantage –until he could absorb them into his bloodsoaked thug army — which swore loyalty ONLY to HIM…….. and finally, hitler was not even from Germany, either.

Bill Rowland

Posted on September 16, 2011 at 5:40pm Obumbler is already starting to panic – his pleas to “love me” – today he predicted he had a better chance at reelection than he originally had to be elected.
OMG – Psalm 109:8

will dems ditch O in '12

Will Angry Left Sacrifice Obama In '12 Election?

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Posted 09/15/2011 06:14 PM ET
 What really caused the left-wing falling-out, less than three years after the hope-and-change crush on Barack Obama? For now, polls.

Obama's popularity has fallen to little more than 40% approval.

Yet the left cannot fairly blame Obama. After all, he rammed through on a strictly partisan vote the century-old liberal dream of a federal takeover of health care — something that Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton never could do. Keynesians never dreamed that a president could actually borrow $5 trillion for domestic spending in less than three years.

The Obama administration even tried to shut down a brand-new Boeing aircraft plant on the shaky argument that the company might thereby be hiring fewer union workers somewhere else.

For environmentalists, Obama kept oil producers out of new fields in Alaska, the American West, the Gulf and other offshore sites. Hundreds of billions in borrowed federal money went to failed "wind and solar" plants to jump-start "millions of green jobs."

The Obama revolution under the radar was even more insidious. Open-borders activists were promised the government would not bother illegal aliens unless they were wanted for felonies. Never has the U.S. joined a foreign government in suing one of its own states — in the way both the Justice Department and Mexico have either filed or joined suits seeking to overturn Arizona's immigration law.

From January 2009 through 2010, Obama advanced the liberal dream with a passion not seen since the New Deal days of Franklin Roosevelt. He bulldozed all opposition and rammed through most of what he wanted from a Democratic Congress — ObamaCare, record borrowing, record spending, hundreds of hard-left presidential appointees and judges.

Far from being namby-pamby, Obama has gone after opponents like no president since Richard Nixon. He urged Hispanics to "punish our enemies." He called his political opponents "hostage-takers." The affluent were lumped together with the super-rich and derided as "millionaires and billionaires, "corporate jet owners" and "fat cat" bankers.

His supporters in unions and the Congressional Black Caucus freely blasted the Tea Party with slurs — with the unspoken assurances that the president's constant calls for civility certainly did not apply to them.

Critics may lampoon Obama's use of a teleprompter, but he still uses it to good effect in his near-daily speeches. Obama is a far better megaphone for left-wing policies than was lackluster Jimmy Carter, pompous Al Gore or condescending John Kerry. He easily outshines wooden Harry Reid and polarizing Nancy Pelosi.

Compared to Obama and his smoothness, an often gaffe-prone Vice President Joe Biden can seem a liability. Obama is as charismatic as "I feel your pain" Bill Clinton — as we saw in 2008, when Obama destroyed the primary challenge of Hillary Clinton.
So the left can't really complain that Obama betrayed the cause or proved inept in advancing it. Instead,

Obama's supporters are mad about is that the public is boiling over chronic 9% unemployment, a comatose housing market, escalating food and fuel prices, near nonexistent economic growth, a gyrating stock market, record deficits, $16 trillion in debt and a historic credit downgrading.

And voters are not just mad, but blaming these hard times on the liberal Obama agenda of more regulations,spending, borrowing, talk of taxes and more "stimulus" programs.

A mostly moderate-to-conservative public has concluded it does not like the new liberal agenda.

After three years, it believes 

Big government/big borrowing medicine made the inherited illness far worse.
Voters may or may not like Obama, but they surely do not like what he is still trying to do.

In response, the left needs a sacrificial lamb.

So it has nonsensically turned with a fury on Obama as if he were culpable for getting through the left's own agenda. If Democrats do not blame the public's anger on their once-beloved messenger, then they're left only with their message itself. And that's something they can't accept.

Obama's Poorly Played Hand

The Obama Presidency by the Numbers

The president constantly reminds us that he was dealt a difficult hand. But the evidence is overwhelming that he played it poorly.

By MICHAEL J. BOSKIN

When it comes to the economy, presidents, like quarterbacks, often get more credit or blame than they deserve. They inherit problems and policies that affect the economy well into their presidencies and beyond. Reagan inherited Carter's stagflation, George H.W. Bush twin financial crises (savings & loan and Third World debt), and their fixes certainly benefitted the Clinton economy.

President Obama inherited a deep recession and financial crisis resulting from problems that had been building for years. Those responsible include borrowers and lenders on Wall Street and Main Street, the Federal Reserve, regulatory agencies, ratings agencies, presidents and Congress.

Stanford economist Michael Boskin on the records that Obama has set as president and last night's jobs speech.

Mr. Obama's successor will inherit his deficits and debt (i.e., pressure for higher taxes), inflation and dollar decline. But fairly or not, historians document what occurred on your watch and how you dealt with your in-box. Nearly three years since his election and more than two years since the economic recovery began, Mr. Obama has enacted myriad policies at great expense to American taxpayers and amid political rancor. An interim evaluation is in order.

And there's plenty to evaluate: an $825 billion stimulus package; the Public-Private Investment Partnership to buy toxic assets from the banks; "cash for clunkers"; the home-buyers credit; record spending and budget deficits and exploding debt; the auto bailouts; five versions of foreclosure relief; numerous lifelines to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; financial regulation and health-care reform; energy subsidies, mandates and moratoria; and constant demands for higher tax rates on "the rich" and businesses.

Consider the direct results of the Obama programs. A few have performed better than expected—e.g., the auto bailouts, although a rapid private bankruptcy was preferable and GM and Chrysler are not yet denationalized successes. But the failed stimulus bill cost an astounding $280,000 per job—over five times median pay—by the administration's inflated estimates of jobs "created or saved," and much more using more realistic estimates.

Cash for clunkers cost $3 billion, just to shift car sales forward a few months. The Public-Private Investment Partnership, despite cheap federal loans, generated 3% of the $1 trillion claimed, and toxic assets still hobble some financial institutions. The Dodd-Frank financial reform law institutionalized "too big to fail" amid greater concentration of banking assets and mortgages in Fannie and Freddie. The foreclosure relief program permanently modified only a small percentage of the four million mortgages the president promised. And even Mr. Obama now admits that the shovels weren't ready in all those "shovel-ready" stimulus projects.

Perpetually overpromising and underdelivering is not remotely good enough, not even for government work. No corporate CEO could survive such a clear history of failure. The economic records set on Mr. Obama's watch really are historic (see nearby table). These include the first downgrade of sovereign U.S. debt in American history, and, relative to GDP, the highest federal spending in U.S. history save the peak years of World War II, plus the highest federal debt since just after World War II.

The employment picture doesn't look any better. The fraction of the population working is the lowest since 1983. Long-term unemployment is by far the highest since the Great Depression. Job growth during the first two years of recovery after a severe recession is the slowest in postwar history.

Moreover, the home-ownership rate is the lowest since 1965 and foreclosures are at a post-Depression high. And perhaps most ominously, the share of Americans paying income taxes is the lowest in the modern era, while dependency on government is the highest in U.S. history.

That's quite a record, although not what Mr. Obama and his supporters had in mind when they pronounced this presidency historic.

Close

President Obama constantly reminds us, with some justification, that he was dealt a difficult hand. But the evidence is overwhelming that he played it poorly. His big government spending, debt and regulation fix has clearly failed. Relative to previous recoveries from deep recessions, the results are disastrous. A considerable fraction of current joblessness, lower living standards, dependency on government and destroyed savings is the result. Worse, his debt explosion will be a drag on economic growth for years to come.Mr. Obama was never going to enthusiastically embrace pro-market, pro-growth policies. But many of his business and Wall Street supporters (some now former supporters) believed he would govern more like President Clinton, post-1994. After a stunning midterm defeat, Mr. Clinton embarked on an "era of big government is over" collaboration with a Republican Congress to reform welfare, ratify the North American Free Trade Agreement and balance the budget. But Mr. Obama starts far further left than Mr. Clinton and hence has a much longer journey to the centeThe president still has time to rebound from his economic policy missteps by promoting permanent, predictable policies to strengthen forecasted anemic growth. But do Mr. Obama and his advisers realize their analysis of the economic crisis was flawed and their attempted solutions mostly misconceived? That vast spending, temporary tax rebates and social engineering did little of lasting value at immense cost? That the prospect of ever more regulation and taxation created widespread uncertainty and severely damaged incentives and confidence? That the repeated attempts to prevent markets (e.g., the housing market) from naturally bottoming and rebounding have created confusion and inhibited recovery? Can Mr. Obama change course, given the evidence that the economy responded poorly to top-down direction from Washington rather than the bottom-up individual initiative that is the key to strong growth? Is he willing to rein in the entitlement state erected under radically different economic and demographic conditions? And will he reform the corporate and personal income taxes with much lower rates on a broader base? Or is he going to propose the same failed policies—more spending, social engineering, temporary tax cuts and permanent tax hikes?

On the answer to these questions, much of Mr. Obama's, and the nation's, future rests.
 
Mr. Boskin, a professor of economics at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.

Solaris is Fraud

Solargate Unraveled

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Scandal: The White House pressured federal officials to OK a loan to an insolvent but politically tied green energy company in advance of a vice-presidential photo-op.
Corruption is not an energy policy. Emails released to the Washington Post before Wednesday's hearings on the $535 million stimulus loan guarantee issued to now-bankrupt Solyndra Inc. reveal the extent of, and resistance to, White House pressure to get the loan approved so Vice President Joe Biden could announce it at a Sept. 4, 2009, groundbreaking event.
The White House has denied applying pressure or even monitoring the review process, saying the stimulus loan guarantee was a good "investment."

The emails show these statements to be false and that the White House knew Solyndra, whose major investor was Tulsa billionaire and Obama fundraiser George Kaiser, was at risk of going under.

The emails show White House officials repeatedly asking the Office of Management and Budget about progress on the loan review. One email from a budget official referred to "the time pressure we are under to sign off on Solyndra" and referred to "a situation of having to do rushed approvals."

"This deal is NOT ready for prime time," one budget analyst wrote in a March 10, 2009, email.

Another Aug. 31, 2009, message written by an OMB staffer and sent to Terrell McSweeny, Biden's domestic policy adviser, concluded, "We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews."

As the Government Accountability Office has stated, due diligence was not done.

Fact is, Solyndra was not a good investment and the White House knew it. The loan guarantee was pushed as part of President Obama's green agenda and to reward a political benefactor.

In one email, an assistant to Rahm Emanuel, now mayor of Chicago but then White House chief of staff, wrote on Aug. 31, 2009, to OMB about the upcoming Biden announcement on Solyndra and asked if "there is anything we can help speed along on the OMB side."
An OMB staffer responded that he "would prefer that the announcement be postponed. ... This is the first loan guarantee, and we should have full review with all hands on deck to make sure we get it right." The White House, which logs show was visited frequently by Solyndra officials, was more interested in getting it done quickly.
Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., chairman of the panel's oversight and investigations subcommittee, said last week that an FBI raid of a Solyndra factory confirmed their belief that the White House's green energy centerpiece was a "bad bet" from the start.

As early as August 2008, outside rating agency Fitch gave Solyndra a B-plus credit rating. Two months earlier, Dun & Bradstreet issued a credit rating for the company of "fair." Of the B-plus rating, Fitch spokeswoman Cindy Stoller said: "It's a noninvestment-grade rating."
In an SEC filing in March 2010, independent auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers said several negative financial factors regarding Solyndra "raise substantial doubts about its ability to continue as a going concern."
The emails show the White House was ignoring the obvious warning signs.

"This loan guarantee was pursued by both the Bush and Obama administrations," White House spokesman Eric Schultz explained in a lame attempt to spread blame.

Yet the results of the congressional probe to date shared with ABC News show that on Jan. 9, 2009, two weeks before President George W. Bush left office, the Energy Department's credit committee voted against a loan commitment for Solyndra.
At least programs such as Cash for Clunkers were honestly run, if dumb in concept.

This Cash for Contributors program goes beyond crony capitalism and shows that ideology and political power are the only concerns of an incompetent administration that once promised hope and change.

Energy Lifts Canada Economy

Canada's Oil Sands Are a Jobs Gusher

• By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

For all its soaring rhetoric, President Obama's "jobs speech" last week didn't demonstrate a lick of insight into why economies grow or how wealth is created. It was merely trademark Obamanomics: using government diktat to move money that's over here, over there.
Having spent an hour the day before with Ron Liepert, the energy minister from the Canadian province of Alberta, I found it especially disturbing to hear nothing in the speech about reversing the administration's anti-fossil-fuels agenda. Canada has recovered all the jobs it lost in the 2009 recession, and Alberta's oil sands are no small part of that. The province is on track to become the world's second-largest oil producer, after Saudi Arabia, within 10 years. Meanwhile Mr. Obama clings to his subsidies for solar panels and his religious faith in green jobs.
U.S. unemployment is high because capital is on strike. Short-term offers to coax investors into taking new risks aren't going to cut it when they have been forewarned that the president intends to pay for it all by raising taxes in the out years. The market dropped over 300 points the day after Mr. Obama's speech.
On the regulatory front the picture is even gloomier. Much of America's vast untapped energy potential lies dormant because Mr. Obama's regulatory watchdogs have spent the past three years throwing sand in the gears of the permitting process for exploration and exploitation on federal lands. Separately, TransCanada has been trying since September 2008 to get a permit to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf Coast. The Environmental Protection Agency has so far blocked it.

 

TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline could mean 118,000 American jobs, if the U.S. government ever issues the permit.

A glimpse of what all this has cost the U.S. economy can be seen by looking north to Canada, where animal spirits have been unleashed in the energy sector. Canada's close economic ties to the U.S. have traditionally meant that when the U.S. gets the sniffles, Canada gets swine flu. This time it's been different. Part of the reason is that Canada's housing market was not poisoned by a federal government push to put unqualified borrowers into homes they could not afford.

After the 2008 collapse of the housing bubble in the U.S., the Canadian financial sector remained strong.

That alone was not enough to protect Canada from the effects of the U.S. recession. The manufacturing sector was hit hard, and in the first quarter of 2009 the economy contracted by an annualized 7.9%.

Yet Canada has outperformed the U.S. since then. In 2010, according to the International Monetary Fund, Canada grew at 3.2% versus 2.9% in the U.S. In 2011, the IMF estimates Canada will grow at 2.9%; unemployment is now 7.3%. The IMF's U.S. growth forecast is 2.5% this year, and U.S. unemployment is 9.1%.

One explanation for Canada's more robust growth is its strong commitment to energy, which has become more valuable in U.S. dollar terms under Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's inflationary policies. Alberta is now producing two million barrels per day but expects that number will grow to four to five million within a decade.

Alberta's oil and gas industry supports more than 271,000 direct jobs and hundreds of thousands of indirect jobs in sectors such as construction, manufacturing and financial services.

The province has an unemployment rate of 5.6%. There are also some 960 American companies involved in Alberta energy, supplying equipment and technology, among other things. As an example, Mr. Liepert says, "dozens of Caterpillar tractors, made in Illinois and Michigan and costing $5 million a piece" work the oil sands. He says the region is on track to create more than 400,000 direct American jobs by 2035. The Bakken region of North Dakota, where private land ownership gives drillers relief from federal obstructionism, shares a similar, if smaller, story. Oil production there is booming, and North Dakota unemployment is 3.3%.

The Americas in the News

TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline, if the U.S. ever issues the permit, will mean $20 billion in investment. The company says the construction phase will require 13,000 direct hires and indirect new jobs could total 118,000 in the U.S.
But Keystone XL is only a fraction of the potential that could be released if Mr. Obama changed his energy policy. In a study commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute and released last week, the energy consultancy Wood MacKenzie estimates that pro-development policies could, by 2030, "support an additional 1.4 million jobs, and raise over $800 billion of cumulative additional government revenue."

On the other hand, according to the study, current policies "which slow down the issuance of leases and drilling permits, increase the cost of hydraulic fracturing through duplicative water or air quality regulations, or delay the construction of oil sands export pipelines such as Keystone XL, will likely have a detrimental effect on production, jobs, and government revenues."

A serious jobs proposal would address these issues. Mr. Obama doesn't have one.
 
Write to O'Grady@wsj.com

KB of PD on American Middle-Class

Thursday, September 08, 2011, 8:49 AM     

By Kevin OBrien, The Plain Dealer

The Plain Dealer

When people refer to the "middle class" -- or any other "class" -- in America, the understanding should be that they're talking about something fluid and flexible.

Using the American connotation, the term "middle class" truthfully can apply only as a snapshot, and even then the picture is fuzzy, because the people in it are in constant motion.

For every Bill Gates climbing toward the top of the economic heap, there's some Carnegie or Vanderbilt headed back the other way.
Our system rewards industriousness, intelligence and good ideas. It doesn't give a fig for surnames.

Obviously, there's a downside to competition and churn. In competitions, not everyone comes in first. With churn, the possibility of falling exists alongside the possibility of rising.

But that's not death. That's life, adapting and evolving as better ideas come along. That's the car key putting the buggy whip on the shelf. All of society adjusts accordingly, but no one adjusts more than the person who can no longer earn a living making buggy whips.

If Ohioans are wise enough to vote "yes" on Issue 2, thereby upholding the law known as Senate Bill 5, state and local governments will be free to do some things in different ways that suit today's economic realities.

Some people now on the public payroll will have to find other uses for their talents. But none of them will be asked to do so the morning after the election.

And we'll have to come up with better ideas for running some public institutions with smaller staffs and leaner budgets. Other institutions eventually will go the way of the buggy whip. (Given the debt situation across the board, that's an inevitability, with or without Issue 2's passage.)

So, yes, significant changes lie ahead for public employees and their agencies.
But to even suggest that a "yes" vote on Issue 2 could, by itself, produce some material change in the composition of the "middle class" is to insult today's public employees by casting unfounded doubt on their ability, their industriousness and their willingness to support themselves.

The case against Issue 2 is emotional, and it cannot bear logical scrutiny.

When Ohioans vote in favor of Issue 2, they won't be voting to end fire or police protection, because they themselves will decide how best to allocate public resources. Nor will they be voting to abolish public education. And they certainly won't be voting to kill the "middle class," whatever it may be at this moment.

Laus Deo !!!

Laus Deo!

Praise Be To God!

Washington Monument East Face of Capstone

3 Steps to Pay Off National Debt

Three Easy Steps for a Debt-Free U.S.

By John Layfield

It’s amazing when a group of elected officials create the very problems that they in turn run against.

The austerity measures that were included in the debt ceiling compromise are anything but draconian. An initial $1.2 trillion over ten years works out to $120 billion a year, about 3% of current spending. So, if we were borrowing about 42 cents out of every dollar we are now borrowing 39cents. No wonder they needed such a long vacation.

I will focus on the fact that the deficit we are trying to close is only the current annual account deficit that we continue to create. By 2021, according to the recent budget we will have accumulated over $20 trillion in deficits. At a more average long term interest rate of 5-6% we will be paying over $1 trillion in interest payments alone. This is a fact acknowledged by both parties.

Since none of the current plans deal with the long-term deficit anyway, only the current account deficit, I want to put mine out there as a solution.

Here are three things we need to pay off our debt.

1. A balanced budget amendment. Can you imagine if President Clinton had been able to pass one what a different world we would be in right now? Not today and not tomorrow-but in a reasonable timeframe of 5-7 years the budget has to be balanced. In case of war or other major event, Congress would have to act to allow extra spending-after all something as drastic as war needs consensus anyway.

2. No “pork”. If you have a person in business that uses company money that was pledged to go to a business project to build a fence around his own home you say he is stealing. Though the fence may be nice and his neighbors may like it-it is stealing. I say to Congress, no more stealing.

3. A temporary national sales tax of 3-5% that goes to paying off the principle portion of the debt. Exclude groceries so as not to adversely affect people with lower incomes. This tax can only by law go toward paying off the principle of the national debt. This tax disappears the second the debt is paid off. The current budget still has to pay current debt service.
In 20-40 years, depending on economic growth, the US will be a superpower with no debt, something we haven’t been since Andrew Jackson last had our balance sheet clean. We would be the strongest country in the history of the world at that point, and our position of power economically would be assured for the rest of the century.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/markets/2011/09/02/three-easy-steps-for-debt-free-us/#ixzz1XCwYfzWC

2012 Depends on SEVEN States

National polls are nice, but Electoral College math is what matters.

By LARRY J. SABATO

 Voting is predictable for well over half the states, so even 14 months out it's easy to shade in most of the map for November 2012.
Barring a Carter-like collapse, President Obama is assured of 175 electoral votes from 12 deep-blue states and the District of Columbia: California (55 electoral votes), Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), Hawaii (4), Illinois (20), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (11), New Jersey (14), New York (29), Rhode Island (4), Vermont (3), Washington state (12) and Washington, D.C. (3). Three more states are not quite as certain, but still likely Democratic: Maine (4), Minnesota (10) and Oregon (7). Even though Minnesota is competitive enough to vote Republican under the right set of conditions, it is the state with the longest Democratic presidential streak, dating to 1976.

 

Four other states usually vote Democratic for president, but they're hardly a sure thing: Michigan (16), New Mexico (5), Pennsylvania (20) and Wisconsin (10). A low Hispanic vote in 2012 could flip New Mexico, as Al Gore carried it by only 366 votes in 2000 and a dedicated effort by George W. Bush flipped it in 2004. In Michigan, economic problems might cause voters to cool on Democrats. Wisconsin, narrowly Democratic in 2000 and 2004, is a cauldron of unpredictable countertrends. And although Pennsylvania has frustrated all GOP attempts to win it over since 1988, recent polls have shown weakness for Mr. Obama there. These 51 electoral votes will be GOP targets if conditions in the fall of 2012 approximate today's.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have their own firewall. Almost any sentient GOP nominee will carry Alabama (9), Alaska (3), Arkansas (6), Idaho (4), Kansas (6), Kentucky (8), Louisiana (8), Mississippi (6), Montana (3), Nebraska (5), North Dakota (3), Oklahoma (7), South Carolina (9), South Dakota (3), Tennessee (11), Utah (6), West Virginia (5) and Wyoming (3). These 18 states have 105 electoral votes.
The Obama forces have bravely boasted that they can turn Arizona (11), Georgia (16) and Texas (38), mainly because of growing Latino voting power. But with the economy in the tank, electoral claims on these big three will likely go the way of John McCain's early declaration in '08 that California was within his grasp. Count another 65 red votes here.

Four years ago, even optimistic Democrats didn't think they would pick up Indiana (11), North Carolina (15), or an electoral vote in Nebraska (which like Maine awards one vote per congressional district), yet all three went for Mr. Obama by small margins. In 2012, Indiana is likely to desert him, as is the one Cornhusker district. To keep North Carolina, the Democrats chose Charlotte for their national convention and will make a big play statewide. As of now, it looks tough for them. Thus Republicans are in the lead to win 26 more electors. Missouri was the sole squeaker that went for McCain; few believe it will be tight next year, so the GOP will likely have those 10 votes, too.
Republicans therefore are a lock or lead in 24 states for 206 electoral votes, and Democrats have or lead in 19 states for 247 electoral votes. That's why seven super-swing states with 85 electors will determine which party gets to the magic number of 270 electoral votes: Colorado (9), Florida (29), Iowa (6), Nevada (6), New Hampshire (4), Ohio (18) and Virginia (13).


 Mr. Sabato is director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, author of Pendulum Swing (Longman, 2011), and editor of the Crystal Ball newsletter, www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball.

O To Congress on the "PRESiDENT's Economic Plan" Sept 8, 2011

In music there's a saying about a performance that was "too small for the house." That's becoming true of the president.


President Obama will this week be addressing a joint session of Congress that doesn't really want to hear from him about a jobs plan that he doesn't really have.

When Mr. Obama entered office, he told us unemployment would not rise over 8% if we passed his stimulus. Now his economic advisers have just told us that unemployment will not fall below the 9% mark through next year. As if to underscore the grim news, the latest jobs report—released in time for Labor Day weekend—shows zero net job growth for August.


The irony is that the president has blown the one chance to do something of substance without looking weak. Back in July when he was negotiating with Speaker Boehner, the two had agreed on a grand bargain that would include real cuts in entitlements. The "give" on the Republican side was that the deal would address "revenues," which to the president means raising taxes and to the speaker means relying on growth to bring in more money to the Treasury's coffers.
For the president, that deal would have allowed him to do something serious about spending—in a highly public and bipartisan way. Even better for him, it might have split the opposition. For such a deal would likely have left Republicans bickering, with some arguing we should wait for a Republican president and others screaming "sellout."
The president, however, got greedy, and killed the deal when he asked for more. That's been his problem all along.

Notwithstanding incessant calls to rise above politics, on issue after issue the president has proved himself incapable of matching his large rhetoric with equally large actions

BEAR Market -Aug. 17

On August 17 the S&P 500 Index 50-EMA crossed down through the 200-EMA,

declairing by our definition that the long-term trend was down and that we were in a bear market. When this happens, we remind ourselves that "bear market rules apply," and that we should expect negative outcomes more often than positive ones.

Bureaucratic Activist NLRB

Thugs Triumph

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Workers' Freedom: A departing Obama administration bureaucrat just made the forcible unionization of American workers a lot easier.

When it comes to bullying, this president has a double standard.

To do something about kids in school getting shoved around, the White House sends the first lady onto the Ellen Show to bemoan the supposed "culture of bullying" in America.

But when it comes to those kids' hard-working fathers and mothers struggling for a paycheck amid 9.1% unemployment, President Obama is only too happy to see them bullied at the hands of labor thugs.

Wilma Liebman,  (may she burn in hell) who has worked as a lawyer for big labor- and union-coddling government agencies unceasingly since 1974, left behind quite a present for her benefactors Sunday as she ended her chairmanship of the National Labor Relations Board.

Included in a series of pro-union decisions was the bureaucratic enactment of "Card Check" over the heads of Congress.

Card Check means that if union forces can get most employees within a workplace to sign a card requesting a unionization election, the opposite happens: A secret ballot of workers is actually prohibited, and the union automatically comes into being — even if most workers oppose being unionized.

The need for privacy in workers expressing their wishes on the exercise of their right to organize must itself be protected as a fundamental right. It is, without question, the only way to stop union intimidation and thuggery of millions of Americans.

As the National Restaurant Association — whose members provide livelihoods to millions — has aptly stated: "An employee's decision to join a union should be made in private, protected from any coercion by unions, employers or co-workers."
In essence, the NLRB ruling undemocratically passes liberal Democrats' deceitfully named "Employee Free Choice Act" into law. As Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, has said in opposition to that bill:

"It is beyond me how one can possibly claim that a system whereby everyone — your employer, your union organizer and your co-workers — knows exactly how you vote on the issue of unionization gives an employee 'free choice.'"

No one would agree to ending voter privacy in elections for president, senators, congressmen, governors and mayors. In union organizing, the likelihood of threats and actual violence are far greater.

Kline now accuses the NLRB of "unloading a barrage of bureaucratic activism that will devastate employees and job creators."

"With more than 14 million Americans unemployed," he suggests, "it is past time the president denounce the job-destroying actions of the NLRB and begin working with Congress on responsible policies that will put our nation's workers and job-creators first."
But the president, who placed Liebman as NLRB chief within hours of his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009, has a different take. In 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama said Card Check would let workers "bargain for their fair share of the wealth our country creates."

Big labor's thugs have shoved Card Check down America's throat against the will of Congress. Just call it using the "bully puppet."

THUGS : Unions top ten (LABOR Day 2011)

http://michellemalkin.com/2011/09/05/happy-labor-day-top-10-union-thug-moments-of-the-year/

As the MSM whitewashes Big Labor’s ugly threats,

Tea Party smears, and history of coerced dues-subsidized racketeering this Labor Day, what better way to mark the holiday than with an illustrated list of top 10 union thug moments of the year.

10. August 16, 2011, across the Northeast. Striking Communications Workers of America declare “open season” on Verizon. Dozens of cases of sabotaged cable lines are reported.

9. February 23, 2011, Washington DC. CWA union thug strikes young female FreedomWorks activist.


8. March 1, 2011, Madison, Wisconsin. Mob rule video: Unhinged crowd corners Wisconsin GOP senator shouting “F**k you,” “Shame!” AFSCME, UFCW, SEIU:

7. August 6, 2011, Boston, MA. Local IBEW 827 storms Verizon VP Bill Foshay’s neighborhood and union members scream “We’re here to fight” in front of his private residence on a weekend afternoon.

6. February 23, 2011, Washington DC. CWA protester screams at FreedomWorks staffer for being a “bad Jew!”

5. February 27, 2011, Madison WI. Union protesters exhibit Fox News Derangement Syndrome:

 Tobin said he has received much heckling, and that a teacher even told him she hates him because it made her feel good. The “utter lack of civility and harassment of reporters,” as anchor Gregg Jarrett described it, is truly breathtaking and seems like a weird strategy to try and win support for one’s cause.
And yes, they threatened to break his neck.

4. February 23, 2011, Columbus, OH. Unhinged union protester fumes: “The tea party is a bunch of d**k-sucking corporate butt-lickers who want to crush the working people of this country.”


3. March 1, 2011, Denver CO. Racist SEIU supporters taunt gay black Tea Party activist and entrepreneur Leland Robinson, who criticized teachers unions at a Capitol rally, by calling him “son,” telling him to “get behind that fence where you belong,” and jeering “Do you have any children? That you claim?”

2. February 24, 2011, Providence, R.I. Rhode Island union supporter to cameraman – “I’ll f**k you in the ass, you faggot.” The eruption starts at 7:32 in this video.

1. February 23, 2011. Democrat Rep. Michael Capuano of Mass. revs up Big Labor goons (starts at 1:50 in the video): “Get a little bloody.”