The Obama Economy: Bovine Fecal Matter On Ice

Well, the good news is that the unemployment rate went down to a seven-year low for Obama to 5.3%  Surely Obama must be doing an awesome job, Democrats say.

Okay.  Obama’s BEST MONTH EVER statistic-wise matches the EIGHT-YEAR AVERAGE for the Bush presidency that Democrats say was terrible. Although, technically, Bush’s average unemployment rate of 5.27% is still BETTER than Obama’s best month EVER.

During the 8 years of the George W. Bush Presidency the lowest annual unemployment rate was 4.61% in 2007, the highest annual unemployment rate was 5.76% in 2008. During Bush’s 8 years as President the average unemployment rate  was 5.27%

Which is another way of saying that “Democrat” and “disgusting, dishonest, pathological hypocrite” may not rhyme, but they sure mean the same thing.

The mainstream media are pathological hypocrites, for sure.  You can take a trip down memory lane and compare how they compared unemployment numbers even when they were BETTER for the Republican presidents.

The bad news is that twice as many people just gave up looking for a job as actually GOT a job this month.

The bad news is that Obama set another record.  And not in any good sense:

Record 93,626,000 Americans Not in Labor Force; Participation Rate Declines to 62.6%
By Ali Meyer | July 2, 2015 | 8:42 AM EDT

(CNSNews.com) – A record 93,626,000 Americans 16 or older did not participate in the nation’s labor force in June, as the labor force participation rate dropped to 62.6 percent, a 38-year low, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In June, according to BLS, the nation’s civilian noninstitutional population, consisting of all people 16 or older who were not in the military or an institution, hit 250,663,000. Of those, 157,037,000 participated in the labor force by either holding a job or actively seeking one.

The 157,037,000 who participated in the labor force equaled only 62.6 percent of the 250,663,000 civilian noninstitutional population, the lowest labor force participation rate seen in 38 years. It hasn’t been this low since October 1977 when the participation rate was 62.4 percent.

Another 93,626,000 did not participate in the labor force. These Americans did not have a job and were not actively trying to find one.

Of the 157,037,000 who did participate in the labor force, 148,739,000 had a job, and 8,299,000 did not have a job were actively seeking one—making them the nation’s unemployed.

The 8,299,000 job seekers were 5.3 percent of the 157,037,000 actively participating in the labor force during the month. Thus, the unemployment rate was 5.3 percent which dropped from the 5.5 percent unemployment seen in May.

The number of employed Americans dropped from 148,795,000 in May to 148,739,000 in June, a decline of 56,000. The number of unemployed Americans also dropped over the month from 8,674,000 in May to 8,299,000 in June, a decline of 375,000.

The labor participation rate was 65.7 percent the day Barack Hussein Obama took office.

I like this article because it’s one of the first I’ve seen that actually gives you a notion of the statistical shenanigan that our “unemployment rate” truly is.  Nearly 94 million working-age people are unemployed, but our unemployment rate only considers 8 million of them.  I guess the other 86 million are silver-spoon trust-fund kids lounging around their mansions sipping champagne and dining on the finest caviar.  Either that or you’re an “abject imbecile” – another synonym for “Democrat” to go alongside “disgusting, dishonest, pathological hypocrite.”

As I’ve been trying to point out over and over again, Obama has been to the labor participation rate what stage 5 lung and bronchus cancer is to quality of life.  Obama has been absolutely devastating and toxic to American jobs.  And like the stage 5 lung and bronchus cancer sufferer, the patient that is the American economy is actually getting weaker and weaker measured in terms of the ALL-IMPORTANT measure of how many working-age Americans actually have a damn JOB.  The rate of Americans with a damn JOB – which for the factual record are LOWER PAYING JOBS with FEWER HOURS under Obama – has been sinking and sinking and sinking.  Thanks to the Obama presidency and the stage five cancer that is the Democrat Party, fewer and fewer Americans are working, while more and more of those fewer and fewer are working for less and cannot get decent full-time jobs.

And what is the Democrat strategy?  Well, further disincentivize employers by putting more and more burdens and obstacles on them.  You know, like treating that stage five lung and bronchus cancer patient with concentrated dosages of asbestos and then blaming the fact that the patient keeps getting sicker on Republicans.

I’ve listened to the smartest, smarmiest Democrats trying to explain why the labor participation rate is so shockingly low under Obama.  Here’s one example:

There are a few reasons why the LFPR has declined. First, the country is aging as baby boomers retire. An older country means a lower percent of the population will be in the labor force. This is a structural reason for the LFPR’s recent decline—it was going to happen regardless of the underlying economic conditions. That’s why many economists forecasted that the rate would slowly fall over time.

Here’s the problem, smart, smarmy Democrat: you’re exactly what the Bible foretold when it said, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools…”  Consider the FACTS that blow the Democrat theory right out of the water akin to the way that the reality of Japanese torpedoes blew up the U.S.S. Arizona in Pearl Harbor when Democrats also didn’t have a freaking clue what the hell was going on:

Last week, though, a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis took on the notion that the drop is all about demographics and not a sign that the labor market is sicker than we think. The study looked at the labor force participation rate not just in the U.S. but in eight major developed countries, including Sweden, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Nearly all of those countries are facing the same demographic trends as the U.S. And Japan is currently dealing with an even more severe case of aging population. And yet, out of the eight nations, the U.S. is the only one where the participation in the labor force is declining.

So much for the Democrat theory that, well, shoot, you can’t blame Obama for the collapse in labor participation.  It was just selfish Republican white people retiring.  Because all the OTHER developed nations have the same demographic issues as America does -with Japan’s aging population FAR WORSE.  And yet somehow we’re doing worse than ANY of them in labor participation.

And for another factoid, it is striking that Democrats are trying to point at an aging demographic to explain our dismal labor participation rate:  BECAUSE THEY HAVE MURDERED SIXTY MILLION INNOCENT BABIES IN THEIR GOD DAMN ABORTION MILLS SINCE 1973 AND WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK THAT WOULD DO TO THE AVERAGE DAMN AGE OF OUR POPULATION???  It’s akin to the classic example of the child who murdered both his parents and then asked for mercy from the court on the grounds that he’s an orphan.  And so we can now document that that proverbial godawful kid is a DEMOCRAT through and through.

If you are a DEMOCRAT – which stands for DEMOn-possessed bureauCRAT – you are a liar without shame, honor, decency, virtue, or integrity of any kind whatsoever.  And one of the reasons you so worship government is that your love of lies most flourishes because the best way to lie of ALL is with STATISTICS.

The article includes a rather striking graph that shows America DEAD LAST among the top developed nations but I keep looking at it:

What I particularly noticed as I stared in horror at this graph of the demise of my country was the fact that Bush was actually bringing the baby up between 2005 and the middle part of 2008.  I checked the Department of Labor chart and the actual numbers back up the graph: the labor participation rate was actually going UP.  Clinton left office just before a TERRIBLE RECESSION PLUS THE DOUBLE-WHAMMY OF THE 9/11 ATTACK struck America as a result of Clinton’s leaving America weak and blind in the face of our enemies.  That recession was called the DotCom Bubble collapse.

Here’s an example of how I’ve pointed out these stubborn things called FACTS in the past:

Clinton’s DotCom crash resulted in $7.1 trillion in American wealth being vaporized:

The Market Capitalization of the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Full Cap was $16.7 Trillion as of April 30, 2008. Comparatively, the market cap at the end of Q1 in 2000 was approximately $16 trillion (only slightly smaller). However, between 2000 Q1 and Q1 2003 the index lost a stunning 43% of its valuation. In other words, $7.1 Trillion of wealth was lost. This stunning number includes the completeness of the crash.

Who was still president in the first quarter of the fiscal year 2000 when this disaster began to blow up?  It was the guy who was still president on January 20, 2001 when George Bush assumed – and dare I say “inherited” – the office of the president.

Here’s another number to think about: 78%.  Because “The Nasdaq Composite lost  78% of its value as it fell from 5046.86 to 1114.11” as it collapsed between March 11, 2000 to October 9, 2002.

Obviously, there was a problem. The first shots through this bubble came from  the companies themselves: many reported huge losses and some folded outright  within months of their offering. Siliconaires were moving out of $4 million  estates and back to the room above their parents’ garage. In the year 1999,  there were 457 IPOs, most of which were internet and technology related. Of  those 457 IPOs, 117 doubled in price on the first day of trading. In  2001 the number of IPOs dwindled to 76, and none of them doubled on the first  day of trading.

I want to know why Bush is still responsible for Obama’s entire economic mess four years later when Bill Clinton was never held responsible for so much as one second of Bush’s mess.  I want to understand why Democrats are lying, dishonest, hypocrite slime whose only talent is bankrupting America and then demagoguing Republicans for what they did.

You find out that the Dotcom bubble began to grow huge in 1995 and virtually all of Clinton’s economic “success” that didn’t have to do with the policies of the Republican House and the Republican Senate that swept into power in 1995 as a result of the historic 1994 asskicking as a result of Clinton’s and the Democrat Party’s abject failure had to do with the inflation of that damn bubble.  Clinton fanned the flames of that Dotcom bubble because he knew that it would explode on the next president’s watch and that Democrats were far too personally and pathologically dishonest to ever blame HIM for it.

And yet Bill Clinton saunters before the 2012 Democrat National Convention and gives a speech saying “You can’t blame Obama for this disaster of an economy.  Why, even I couldn’t have fixed it.”  And the liberal media listen to their former messiah absolve their current messiah and ignore the fact that Bill Clinton is a serial liar who was DISBARRED by the Supreme Court for LYING as well as a serial womanizing sexual predator who sexually abused five women and they said, “Well, that settles it.  NO one can blame ‘the One’ now; the former ‘One’ has spoken.”  And the “War on Women” party cheers.

I’ve been pointing this out over and over again recently: if you are a Democrat, you are a LIAR at home with LIES.  You are a BAD PERSON.  You have one middle finger stuck up in the air at the God of the Bible you rabidly despise and the other middle finger shoved up your rectum because you are a DEPRAVED PERVERT.

The above quote is about how Bill Clinton led America straight into the vicious  gut-punch of a giant recession that the pathologically dishonest propaganda mill that is the mainstream media refused to credit him with even though there is no question that the economy was clearly going into recession as Bill Clinton was still in office which then exploded under George Bush.  But we’ve also got to consider the knockout-punch to the head that was the 9/11 attack as a result of Bill Clinton leaving America both weak and blind and with a reputation for withdrawing from conflict.  You know, just as Barack Obama has now done to America.  Obama isn’t just the first president since Kennedy to beg for spacecraft rides because he’s pissed away our space capability; he’s now actually having to beg for ships to deploy our Marines!!!  In a time when our enemies are building up their militaries and becoming stronger, America under Obama is becoming weaker and weaker.  Which is why we’re getting bullied around – by Islamic State, by China, by Russia, by Iran, just to name a few enemies – like we have never been in my entire lifetime.

We are ripe for an attack by emboldened enemies.  And no nation has EVER deserved to be attacked more than this wretched Obamanation.

Another thing I noticed as I look at the above graph is that the liberal explanation that the labor participation rate was highest under Bill Clinton fails to consider a key fact (not including the fact that it was actually much higher under both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush than it ever was under Bill Clinton): I notice that the labor participation rate PLUNGED under Bill Clinton for the first years of his presidency when he was playing the role of liberal president with a Democrat Congress.  But then in 1994 Clinton had his ass handed to him by the American people who put REPUBLICANS in charge of both the House and the Senate.  And Bill Clinton ultimately uttered the famous words, “The era of big government is OVER.”  And it was under the REPUBLICAN policies OF reducing the giant jackboot of federal government power that the economy managed something of a rebound.  At least until the DotCom bubble and the 9/11 attack both of which Bill Clinton was solely responsible for, which forced George Bush to build it up all over again.

I’ve patiently explained why the economy collapsed under the Bush presidency.  It was the Democrat-constructed housing bubble enacted by the Democrat-created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (otherwise known as GSEs, which is the acronym for the blatantly leftist fascistic crony capitalist monstrosity of Government Sponsored Enterprises).  I end the second of the above articles I link to with this:

What did Democrats do with the mainstream media’s culpability?  They falsely dropped the crisis at the feet of “greedy” Wall Street.  But while examples of Wall Street greed abound, the liberal intelligentsia deliberately overlooked the central and preceding role of Democrat-dominated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Here’s how the mess actually happened:

The New York Times acknowledged that Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “buy mortgages from lenders and repackage them as securities or hold them in their own portfolios.”

And the Los Angeles Times on May 31, 1999 describes how this process turned into a bubble, as more begat more, and then more and more begat more and more and more:

Lenders also have opened the door wider to minorities because of new initiatives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–the giant federally chartered corporations that play critical, if obscure, roles in the home finance system. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from lenders and bundle them into securities; that provides lenders the funds to lend more. . . .

In a nutshell, Fannie and Freddie, in their role as Government Sponsored Enterprises, bought tens of millions of mortgages, and then repackaged them into huge mortgage-backed securities that giant private entities such as Bear Stearns, AIG and Lehman Brothers purchased.  What made these securities particularly attractive to the private banking entities was that these securities were essentially being sold – and had the backing – of the United States government.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, again, are Government Sponsored Enterprises.

Here’s the process:

The Role of the GSEs is to provide liquidity and stability to the U.S. housing and mortgage markets. Step 1 Banks lend money to Households to purchase and refinance home mortgages Step 2 The GSEs purchase these mortgage from the banks Step 3 GSEs bundle the mortgages into mortgage-backed securities Step 4 GSEs sell mortgage-backed and debt securities to domestic and international capital investors Step 5 Investors pay GSEs for purchase of debt and securities Step 6 GSEs return funds to banks to lend out again for the issuance of new mortgage loans.

Now, any intelligent observer should note a primary conflict that amounts to a fundamental hypocritical contradiction: the GSE’s role was to “provide stability,” and yet at the same time they were taking on “significantly more risk” in the final year of the Clinton presidency.  What’s wrong with this picture?

The GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were designed to bundle up the mortgages into mortgage backed securities and then sell them to the private market.

Fannie Mae is exempt from SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] regulation. Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them.  This allowed Fannie Mae to bundle up mortgages, which were then rated AAA with no requirement to make clear what is in the bundle.  Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them.

This is what allowed the toxic instruments that have been sold across the world to proliferate.  And then to explode.  It also created a situation where money institutions did not know and could not find out whether potential inter-bank business partners were holding these “boiled babies on their books, complete with a golden stamp on the wrapping,” rather than safe instruments.  This then inclined banks to a natural caution, to be wary of lending good money to other banks against these ‘assets’.  And thus banks refused to lend to one another.

And it was Democrats, not Bush, and not Republicans, who were all over this disaster that destroyed our economy in 2008.

We were led by a pathologically dishonest media to believe that Republicans had created this mess, when it fact it had been Democrats.  And so we gave the very fools who destroyed our economy total power.

Anybody who wants to see “right wing Republican policies” in that 2008 collapse is what I call an idiot.  Democrats under Jimmy Carter enacted the Community Reinvestment Act – which insanely and immorally forced banks to make loans to poor minorities who couldn’t afford to actually pay for them – that was expanded under Bill Clinton at the tail end of his presidency; and Democrats then used the expanded GSEs to pound the crack in the economic wall that the CRA fiasco created wide open.  George W. Bush tried SEVENTEEN TIMES to install sane regulations to control Fannie and Freddie, but Democrats rabidly refused to allow ANY controls for their out-of-control GSEs.  These are just FACTS.  Bush’s failure was that he shrugged his shoulders while Democrats planted a giant bomb in our economic engine; George Bush’s failure was that he failed to hunt every single Democrat down with dogs and burn them alive.

The fact of the matter is that when Clinton governed left, the economy floundered and was failing.  The American people went right, elected a rightwing Congress, and Clinton went with them for the greater part. Things that Bill Clinton gives himself sole credit for were actually platforms from the Republican Contract with America.  Now we’ve got this demonstrably false myth that Clinton was a liberal who governed as a liberal and that is why the economy flourished.

I’ve got to end somewhere, although I can literally go on all day.  Because the actual facts prove that Democrats are basically the cause of everything that is evil or ruinous in America.  So let me just end with something that George Will said a few weeks ago (when the labor participation rate merely matched the horror of 1978 rather than beat it for being even WORSE as it just did):

CHRIS WALLACE, FOX NEWS SUNDAY: We could continue this conversation and I’m sure we will, but let’s turn to the economy and some really disappointing numbers on the economy this week. Here they are. Only 126,000 jobs were added in March. That’s the weakest hiring in 15 months. Labor force participation dropped to 62.7 percent, matching the lowest since 1978. And the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta estimates first quarter growth at zero, zero percent, flat. George, what’s going on here?

GEORGE WILL, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Well, for the second year in a row they’ve blamed poor quarterly growth on insufficient global warming, that is on winter, on an unusually cold winter. Let your mind go back to November last year. There was job creation of 321,000 jobs and the administration said this is a miraculous achievement and a harbinger of things to come. It wasn’t a harbinger and it wasn’t miraculous. During the Reagan recovery there were 23 months of job creation over 300,000. Reagan had a month of job creation of 1 million and this was at a time when there were 75 million fewer Americans. Now, never mind zero growth. We are now being told really that two percent growth may be the new normal. If so, that’s a disaster because every day, today, yesterday, tomorrow, every day between now and 2030, 10,000 more baby boomers become eligible for Social Security and Medicare. If we have two percent growth, the crisis of the welfare state, the crisis of the private sector being able to throw off the revenues, to pay the bills for the promises we’ve made to ourselves becomes impossible.

WALLACE: Just tell again that the labor force participation stat that you have, if it were what it was at the beginning of the Obama administration.

WILL: If the workforce participation rate today were as high as it was on the day Barack Obama was inaugurated, the unemployment rate in this country would be 9.7 percent, we wouldn’t be complaining about the bad recovery because we wouldn’t call it a recovery.

It takes the Holy Bible to explain the sheer idiocy that is a Democrat voter:

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil; who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness, who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. — Isaiah 5:20

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Fascist Criminal Thug-In-Chief Obama Turns On Citigroup (But If Citigroup Did Something Wrong, Why Is Jack Lew Who Ran Citi Unit Not In JAIL?)

According to lawthug Eric Holder, Citigroup is a reckless criminal enterprise that ruthlessly preyed on helpless little people to such a whopping extent that it required a $7 billion settlement to balance the scales of justice.

This fits into the narrative that clearly the government was not at fault in our financial meltdown (well, except Bush and the Bush administration, which are Republican and therefore can be blamed for everything that goes wrong).  Government is inherently and intrinsically good as long as Obama is running it rather than a Republican president, you see.  And so we can’t blame the Community Reinvestment Act – which forced lending institutions to make loans to people any fool knew would not be able to make their payments.  Even though it clearly led to a six-plus TRILLION dollar balloon that HAD to burst as Democrats used the CRA as a means to reward their supporters at the skyrocketing cost of everyone else:

And which Republicans very clearly WARNED would burst:

Nope. It’s Bush’s fault, no matter how much to blame Democrats clearly WERE.

We can’t blame Barack Obama for his own particularly egregious role in those forced loans to high-risk individuals.  We can’t blame Democrats for forcing “adherence to that act [which] led to riskier lending by banks.”  We can’t blame Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – which came up with the incredibly risky strategy as I document in quite a few articles such as this one:

Why do I mention the Government Supported Enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?  Because they were at the very heart of the mortgage meltdown.

The LA Times writes on May 31, 1999 that:

Lenders also have opened the door wider to minorities because of new initiatives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–the giant federally chartered corporations that play critical, if obscure, roles in the home finance system. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from lenders and bundle them into securities; that provides lenders the funds to lend more. . . .

LaVaughn M. Henry, Ph.D. Director, U.S. Economic Analysis The PMI Group, Inc. December 9, 2008, pointed out:

The Role of the GSEs is to provide liquidity and stability to the U.S. housing and mortgage markets. Step 1 Banks lend money to Households to purchase and refinance home mortgages Step 2 The GSEs purchase these mortgage from the banks Step 3 GSEs bundle the mortgages into mortgage-backed securities Step 4 GSEs sell mortgage-backed and debt securities to domestic and international capital investors Step 5 Investors pay GSEs for purchase of debt and securities Step 6 GSEs return funds to banks to lend out again for the issuance of new mortgage loans.

It was steps 3-5 that messed us up.  Fannie and Freddie bought mortgages – including many mortgages that poor and minority homeowners couldn’t begin to afford under the mandate of the Community Reinvestment Act – bundled them such that no one could assess their risk, and then sold them to private companies such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.  Fannie and Freddie were exempt from SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] regulations.   The GSEs could bundle up mortgages, which would then be rated AAA, with no requirement to make clear what was in the bundle.  Private companies believed that the bundled securities were guaranteed, since they were essentially being sold by the federal government.

But there were many who predicted that this system – created and maintained by Democrats – could explode.

From the New York Times in September 30, 1999:

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.“

”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.” . . .

And that is precisely what happened.  There was a downturn (and there will ALWAYS be downturns, won’t there?), and Fannie and Freddie were so leveraged that they collapsed and caused the collapse of the entire industry.  Financial experts anxiously pointed out that a decline of only 1.3% would bankrupt Fannie and Freddie because they were leveraged to the tune of 60%? to 78%.

Democrats were the priests and acolytes of the GSE system.  They protected it, and they were the ones who pressed all the buttons and pulled all the levers.

Keven Hasset concludes an article titled, “How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis“, concludes by saying:

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons.  Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices.  Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.

Watch this video showing how George Bush and John McCain repeatedly warned of the economic collapse (length=4 min):

Watch this video of Democrats protecting and covering for Fannie Mae (length=8 min):

Here’s a video entitled “Burning Down the House: What Caused Our Economic Crisis?” (length=11 min)

And then we find that Barack Obama was in bed with Fannie and Freddie and their shockingly risky policies:

Who really exploded the economy in 2008, liberals or conservatives? Who do you think?  The liberal mainstream media allowed Democrats to blame George Bush simply because he was president at the time, never mentioning that the Democrats who controlled both the House and the Senate relentlessly opposed everything Bush tried to do; and it allowed Democrats to not have to account for the fact that they’d been in complete control of both the House and the Senate.  But remember that the economy went from outstanding to collapsed during the two years (2006-2008) that the Congress was under Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.  The unemployment rate was 4.4% when Republicans last ran Congress.  What is it now, three years of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid later?

Few people understand how huge Fannie and Freddie are, or how deeply burrowed they are in the mortgage industry.  But let me put it to you this way: the federal government now underwrites 9 out of 10 residential mortgages.

John McCain tried to warn us in 2006:

I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

But he was ignored.

When George Bush first tried to regulate an already out-of-control liberal bastion of Fannie and Freddie, Barney Frank led the united Democrat opposition and said:

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

And just before Fannie and Freddie collapsed and brought down the entire housing mortgage industry with it creating the economic meltdown, Barney Frank – continuing to stop any regulation of Fannie and Freddie – said this:

REP. BARNEY FRANK, D-MASS.: I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They’re not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went completely bankrupt shortly after Barney Frank testified that they were “fundamentally sound,” and had to be bailed out by the government.  It had been Fannie and Freddie which had the sole authority to buy mortgages, bundle them into the mortgage-backed securities which ultimately exploded, and sell those securities to private companies (as I have already shown).  Just as it was Fannie and Freddie which had been the seller of subprime loans.

Three top Democrats, Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson and Jamie Gorelick “fundamentally transformed” Fannie Mae into a liberal Democrat exploitation machine and made MILLIONS in illegitimate bonuses cooking the books.

I could go on and on.  But one thing is crystal clear to anyone who wants to know the truth and who isn’t demon-possessed: Democrats forced banks to do something incredibly stupid, and banks did the very best they could to operate in a Kafkaesque system that Democrats created and cynically exploited and Bush tried seventeen times to stop.

I mock you Democrats now, because every single ONE of you is a future permanent resident of the fire of hell.  You demonize Republicans as “obstructionists” and “terrorists” for preventing Obama and Democrats from running roughshod over America.  But when Bush was president you OBSTRUCTED him at virtually every damn turn.  You fascist hypocrites without shame.

Let me get back to Jack Lew and our Fascist-in-Chief Obama.

Citigroup gets this massive fine.  They were criminals, Obama and Holder say.

So why is the man who ran the unit that performed all the criminal actions our Treasury Secretary???

That’s the question the Wall Street Journal is asking:

The Citigroup ATM
Jack Lew and Tim Geithner escape mention in the bank settlement.
The Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2014 7:37 p.m. ET

The Department of Justice isn’t known for a sense of humor. But on Monday it announced a civil settlement with Citigroup over failed mortgage investments that covers almost exactly the period when current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew oversaw divisions at Citi that presided over failed mortgage investments. Now, that’s funny.

Though Justice, five states and the FDIC are prying $7 billion from the bank for allegedly misleading investors, there’s no mention in the settlement of clawing back even a nickel of Mr. Lew’s compensation. We also see no sanction for former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who allowed Citi to build colossal mortgage risks outside its balance sheet while overseeing the bank as president of the New York Federal Reserve.

The settlement says Citi’s alleged misdeeds began in 2006, the year Mr. Lew joined the bank, and the agreement covers conduct “prior to January 1, 2009.” That was shortly before Mr. Lew left to work for President Obama and two weeks before Mr. Lew received $944,518 from Citi in “salary, payout for vested restricted stock,” and “discretionary cash compensation for work performed in 2008,” according to a 2010 federal disclosure report. That was also the year Citi began receiving taxpayer bailouts of $45 billion in cash, plus hundreds of billions more in taxpayer guarantees.

While Attorney General Eric Holder is forgiving toward his Obama cabinet colleagues, he seems to believe that some housing transactions can never be forgiven. The $7 billion settlement includes the same collateralized debt obligation for which the bank already agreed to pay $285 million in a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Justice settlement also includes a long list of potential charges not covered by the agreement, so prosecutors can continue to raid the Citi ATM.

Citi offers in return what looks like a blanket agreement not to sue the government over any aspect of the case, and waives its right to defend itself “based in whole or in part on a contention that, under the Double Jeopardy Clause in the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, or under the Excessive Fines Clause in the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, this Agreement bars a remedy sought in such criminal prosecution or administrative action.” We hold no brief for Citi, which has been rescued three times by the feds. But what kind of government demands the right to exact repeated punishments for the same offense?

The bank’s real punishment should have been failure, as former FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair and we argued at the time. Instead, the regulators kept Citi alive with taxpayer money far beyond what it provided most other banks as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Keeping it alive means they can now use Citi as a political target when it’s convenient to claim they’re tough on banks.

And speaking of that $7 billion, good luck finding a justification for it in the settlement agreement. The number seems to have been pulled out of thin air since it’s unrelated to Citi’s mortgage-securities market share or any other metric we can see beyond having media impact.

If this sounds cynical, readers should consult the Justice Department’s own leaks to the press about how the Citi deal went down. Last month the feds were prepared to bring charges against the bank, but the necessities of public relations intervened.

According to the Journal, “News had leaked that afternoon, June 17, that the U.S. had captured Ahmed Abu Khatallah, a key suspect in the attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi in 2012. Justice Department officials didn’t want the announcement of the suit against Citigroup—and its accompanying litany of alleged misdeeds related to mortgage-backed securities—to be overshadowed by questions about the Benghazi suspect and U.S. policy on detainees. Citigroup, which didn’t want to raise its offer again and had been preparing to be sued, never again heard the threat of a suit.”

This week’s settlement includes $4 billion for the Treasury, roughly $500 million for the states and FDIC, and $2.5 billion for mortgage borrowers. That last category has become a fixture of recent government mortgage settlements, even though the premise of this case involves harm done to bond investors, not mortgage borrowers.

But the Obama Administration’s references to the needs of Benghazi PR remind us that it could be worse. At least Mr. Holder isn’t blaming the Geithner and Lew failures on a video.

We now live in a time when a fascist Hitler-style leader simply “invents” something he calls “justice.”  Whose to blame and who is absolved?  It’s no different than Stalin randomly signing death warrants for the execution of “criminals” whose “crime” was whatever the hell he happened to say it was.  All you have to do is substitute the word “tea party” for “kulak” to get the essence of Stalinist thug Obama.

Consider that Citigroup was SEVENTH on the donor list for the Obama campaign.  Oh, the top people – the Citi execs like Jack Lew who GAVE Obama that money that enabled him to forever afterward screw up our political system by being the first candidate to bypass the federal matching funds system so he could raise over a BILLION DOLLARS from the filthiest rich – got off the hook and got their huge bonuses for doing their dirty work for liberals.  Jack Lew was the chief operating officer of the Citigroup unit that profited from the loans that Obama is now saying are evil and suing Citigroup for making.  He is as much to blame for those loans as any human being dead or alive and he’s not only off scott free but he’s Obama’s damn TREASURY SECRETARY!!!  And of course if God – oops, I mean liberal secular humanist Government – giveth in the form of bailouts it can surely taketh away.  Just like it’s takething and takething from US now to giveth to illegals who everyone knows will soon be voting Democrat.

Only a Democrat can be rat bastard enough to assert that a company can somehow do $7 BILLION worth of wrong but the man who led the wrongdoing should be lavishly rewarded so long as he’s a loyal-enough Obama stooge.

Jonathon Turley, the nation’s foremost LIBERAL constitutional scholar, testified yesterday that Barack Obama is a clear and present danger to our Constitution.  He pointed out “a shifting of the balance of power … in favor of a now dominant Executive Branch” and describes “the rise of a type of uber-presidency.  Our system is changing in a dangerous and destabilizing way.”

Meanwhile, Obama thug Hilda Solis is clearly heard on tape pressuring a subordinate – in crystal clear FELONY violation of the Hatch Act – to support the Obama campaign.  That’s when you put pressure on somebody who works under you for the government to support a political campaign.  It’s a CRIME.  Not that violating the Hatch Act is a big deal to Obama or any of his thugs, as Kathleen Sabelius also demonstrated when she did it too.

And at this point, if you do not believe that Barack Obama ORDERED the thugs at his IRS to violate the rights of conservatives by using the tax system as a political weapon to target his enemies, I can only conclude that you are either stupid or demon-possessed or both.  Because the pattern of guilt and corruption is simply beyond overwhelming at this point.

This is the most criminally corrupt and fascist administration that has EVER been.

 

 

 

 

Hey, ‘Republicans Drove Us Into A Ditch’ Liberals, Put THIS Into Your Pipe and Smoke It: Conservative Economic Principles RULE In Texas

This isn’t a piece by conservative Jonah Goldberg saying what all conservatives already know.  This is a piece by a self-identified liberal writing in the Los Angeles Times acknowledging a FACT that is frankly the death knell of liberal economic policy.

43% of ALL jobs created in the United States since June of 2009 have come from a conservative state that represents 8% of the national economy.  And Barack Obama has taken credit for every single one of them even as he demonizes the policies that actually produced all of those jobs.

Now, notice how this liberal tries to give credit to the most successful job-engine in America, and then steal that credit away from the conservatives and the conservative policies that brought that job-engine about.

Texas, the jobs engine
Conservatives hail it and liberals dispute the story, but one thing is certain about the Lone Star State’s employment success: The number is real.

By Rick Wartzman
July 3, 2011

For the last few weeks, I’ve been unable to get a startling statistic out of my head: Since the recession officially ended, Texas has created more than 4 of every 10 new jobs in America.

That’s right, Texas: the reddest of red states, home to gun lovers and school textbooks that openly question whether the Founding Fathers intended for the separation of church and state. I am no ideologue. Still, whenever I get political, I tend to tilt reflexively to the left, making the jobs figure a bit disconcerting at first.

But there’s no escaping it. The number is real. Which means that if you care about putting people back to work at a time when nearly 14 million in this country are unemployed, maybe Texas has something to teach us.

Unfortunately, that’s not the posture many commentators have taken. Instead, when the data from Texas emerged — touted first by Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas — conservatives were quick to celebrate, embracing the jobs tally as powerful evidence of the superiority of Republican ideas as well as proof that Texas Gov. Rick Perry would make a good president. But that’s overly simplistic [me: yeah, that’s right.  Let’s keep re-analyzing this until we somehow we make it a victory for Obama liberalism in spite of the fact that Republicans have been running this state at every single political level].

Meanwhile, those on the liberal end of the spectrum immediately set out to shoot the numbers down. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, for instance, held up a giant bologna and mocked the notion of a “Texas miracle.” That view, however, is too cavalier.  [Me: yeah, you’ve got a better way to steal credit from conservatives, don’t you, Wartzman?].

So what’s actually happening?

First, the basics. According to the Dallas Fed, Texas generated 43% of the net new jobs in the U.S. from June 2009 through May 2011 — an enormous share when you consider that the Lone Star State accounts for about 8% of the nation’s economy. (Critics, including Maddow, have been quick to note that the unemployment rate in Texas, at 8%, falls in the middle of the pack among the states. Yet total employment is a much more telling and reliable statistic than is the jobless rate.)

Aspects of the Texas economy are unusual, if not unique, and it will be difficult or impossible for other states to replicate them. For example, the energy industry is booming right now, as are agricultural commodities destined for export — a boon for a huge cotton and beef producer like Texas. [Me: Let’s simply ignore the fact that MANY states have abundant oil resources, but THOSE states are refusing to drill for them because they have a particularly nasty species of vermin called “liberals” running them.  Meanwhile, Democrats in California have gutted what had been the most productive agricultural region in the entire world by shutting off their water and protecting a stupid little fish.  It’s as if the other states are cutting their own throats and then pointing out that Texas is only doing so well because it hasn’t cut it’s own throat too].

What’s more, thorny tradeoffs surely exist. Texas is attracting businesses, in part, because it has low taxes. But that, in turn, makes for a smaller safety net, which is one reason Texas has a high incidence of poverty and, compared with every other state, the biggest proportion of its population without health insurance. There are also serious questions about the quality of jobs in Texas. A “right to work” state, it is tied with Mississippi for having the biggest percentage of workers paid at or below the minimum wage.  [Me: I’d rather have a job and make my own way than live off of a welfare state paid by other people’s money until the safety net collapsed.  But that’s just me.  This amounts to another way of saying, ‘Yes, Texas is creating all the jobs; but we want socialism in America, not jobs.  Aside from that, the data shows that Texas shares higher poverty rates with every single other state in the southern region (which shows that poverty is a problem with the entire region rather than a problem with Texas).  But hey, we have to bash Texas for being successful, right?  You need to understand something: Democrats don’t give a DAMN about creating jobs; they only care about leftwing UNION jobs, as what’s going on in South Carolina over a Boeing plant amply demonstrates].

But even with these significant caveats, Texas has long been the most robust jobs engine in the country, and its policies and practices deserve deeper reflection. Some say, for example, that an increase in education funding 25 years ago lifted the quality of the workforce. “That set the table for job expansion,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Mitchell Schnurman has asserted. (Budget pressures in Texas are now forcing education spending to go in the other direction.).  [Me: you heard right; let’s give all the credit to what Democrats did 25 years ago so we don’t have to give any credit at all to what Republicans have done ever since.  Because liberals must always get the credit no matter how far back you have to go to do it; and conversely, conservatives must always get the blame no matter how far back you have to go to do it].

Also deserving of further exploration are the strict lending guidelines that Texas banks instituted after the S&L crisis of the 1980s. Those standards spurred institutions to keep larger capital reserves and take on fewer problem mortgages than were seen elsewhere in the country. As a result, the state emerged relatively unscathed from the most recent real estate meltdown.  [Me: this is an quick reference to the Democrat-imposed Fannue and Freddie subprime lending policies that were supposed to make home ownership a right for minorities who couldn’t repay their loans.  George Bush tried to reform these policies 17 times, but Democrats – who ran both the House and the Senate when our economy crashed – would have none of these common-sense Republican reforms.  Fortunately conservative Texas passed their own laws to protect them from the Community Reinvestment Act and all the other Democrat horrors].

At the same time — and this, of course, is the tough part for those on the left to swallow — it is clear that the state’s limits on taxes, regulations and lawsuits are contributing to the job machine. “The most important thing I think that’s happened to us is tort reform,” Fisher, the Dallas Fed president, has said. He added that when John Deere and other companies have decided to hire in Texas, they’ve been largely driven by steps the state has taken to cap non-economic damages in medical malpractice suits and to make it harder to bring product liability and class-action cases.

For those whose knee-jerk instinct is to dump on such logic, they would do well here to consider the source. Fisher served in President Carter’s Treasury Department and as a high-ranking trade official for President Clinton, and was a two-time Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. Although the former investment banker is certainly not an ardent leftie, he is no right-wing zealot either.

To be sure, Texas is not without lots of problems. And its remarkable employment growth is not without attendant concerns. But for those on the left to dismiss the state’s jobs story out of hand, just because Republicans have embraced it as a showpiece, is counterproductive and foolish.

Counterproductiveness and foolishness are two of the three hallmarks that define the left.  Hypocrisy is the third.

A lot of Californians are whining about the fact that many “Texas jobs” came at California’s expense.  And the whiny liberals are right; many of those employers DID escape from the liberal hellhole known as the People’s Soviet State of California.  But here’s the question: do you want America to be more like California – which among other things features a $500 billion black hole of economic death known as unfunded liabilities from state union pensions – or do you want a job?  Do you want a demagogic excuse for why all the jobs are going elsewhere, or do you want a job?  Do you want to sit on your fat pimply sweaty ass living on welfare until the system crashes and you starve to death, or do you want a system that actually produces something?

If you want the former vote for Obama, vote for Democrats, and then go to hell when you die.  If you want the latter, for God’s sakes, please vote for the Republicans who  are actually creating jobs in America.

Democrats look back at 2008 and blame “failed Republican policies.”  Basically, all they have to point at is the fact that George Bush was president when it happened.  They ignore the fact that Democrats had total control of the House and near total control of the Senate for nearly two years prior to the disaster happening.  They claim that Republicans refusing to regulate was what created the mess.  They ignore the fact that Democrats REPEATEDLY refused ANY regulation whatsover of Fannie and Freddie which had overwhelming control of the housing market that actually caused the meltdown.  Look at the actual facts:

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/aei-article-how-fannie-and-freddie-blew-up-the-economy/

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/barney-frank-and-democrat-party-most-responsible-for-2008-economic-collapse/

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/barney-frank-video-proves-democrats-at-core-of-2008-economic-collapse/

http://hennessysview.com/business/franklin-raines-criminal-enterprise-and-barack-obama-his-accomplice/

http://politicsorpoppycock.com/2008/09/28/franks-fingerprints-are-all-over-the-financial-fiasco/

The last link above refers to a Boston Herald story which has since been scrubbed.  It’s amazing how articles that taint Democrats have a way of “vanishing.”  It’s one of the reasons I blog.  I want to preserve the record of what actually happened to this country.

All this to say that Democrats had a false demagogic narrative based on lies.

But the American people bought those lies in 2008.  And Democrats had dictatorial control of the White House, the House of Representatives and a filibuster-proof Senate for nearly two full years.  And they took their same failed policies which led to the economic collapse of 2008 and expanded them.  And they promised Americans that their godawful stimulus would work.  It not only failed; it completely failed even by the Obama White House’s own constantly-shifting standards.  And it cost us $3.27 TRILLION we didn’t have.

Now, amazingly, the fact that the president happens to be a Democrat – and the fact that that Democrat took bad news and made it far worse – no longer matters.  Now Democrats want to say that it’s the Republicans – who only control the House of Representatives – are blocking economic progress.  Even though it DIDN’T matter that Nancy Pelosi was running the House of Representatives into the ground in 2007 and 2008.  To go along with Harry Reid doing the same thing during the same time period in the US Senate.

Democrats don’t run on facts; they run on demagoguery.  Remember that the man who led Texas into the job-creating machine that it is not only has nothing to do with George Bush, he actually didn’t like Bush as a big spending and compromising “compassionate conservative.”  Because Democrats and their mainstream media propagandists are already starting to tell the demagogic lie that Rick Perry is somehow identical to George Bush simply because the two men were governors of the same state.

Unemployment Rises To 9.8% – When Will Obama Failure Quit Being ‘Unexpected’?

“Unexpected” is the very favorite adjective of the mainstream media these days.  And it will continue to be their favorite adjective until Obama is finally driven out of office in the same spirit of disgrace and abject failure that Jimmy Carter left under.

When a Democrat – and most especially when a liberal Democrat – is president, every single new negative economic report is an utter surprise that no one could possibly have every expected.

When a Republican is running the country, by contrast, no matter how good things might be, it’s actually a bad thing.

The media’s bias is simply mindboggling.  As I have frequently documented:

Media’s Bias, Dishonesty Re: Reagan Vs. Obama Unemployment Bodes Ill For America

And as researches have proven with media studies:

Partisan Bias in Newspapers?  A Study of Headlines Says Yes

An article titled, “Stocks Fall… Unemployment Rate Rises… Factory Orders Down” sums up the Obama economy:

NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks have begun the trading day down, with a disappointing jobs report souring investors’ mood. The Dow, the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 are all seeing modest declines in early trading.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Economists had expected better, but the Labor Department reports the nation’s employers added only 39,000 jobs last month. That was a sharp drop from the 172,000 created in October. It also pushes the nation’s unemployment rate to 9.8 percent. It’s now been above 9 percent for 19 straight months, the longest stretch on record.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Commerce Department reports orders to U.S. factories fell 0.9 percent in October. That’s the biggest drop since May. Plunging demand for commercial and military aircraft was the biggest factor. Excluding transportation, orders were off 0.2 percent.

But here we are.  With our most current “Unexpected Update To Unexpected Unemployment News.”

A Labor Department report released today reveals job creation in November was down by 133,000 jobs from October, bringing the total unemployment rate up to 9.8 percent.

This was a declared the most recent Unexpected Development in our long unemployment saga by the media.  Private-sector job creators are facing massive tax hikes, which the President and his Party say they will defend to the bitter end.  The cost of labor has skyrocketed due to a poorly designed, constantly mutating health care bill, which keeps spitting out unforeseen, but universally expensive, consequences.  Somehow there are “analysts” who think they will respond to these factors by expanding their operations and hiring more people.  Such analysts now live in a constant state of surprise.

Only 39,000 jobs were added in November, which makes it the sixteenth consecutive month in which unemployment has remained above 9.5%, the worst record since the Great Depression.  You may recall that the Democrats predicted 7% unemployment by now, after a peak below 8%, if their trillion-dollar “stimulus” bill was passed.  The Republican House Ways & Means Committee certainly does, and put out a press release to that effect this morning.

The ABC News report of the new unemployment figures contains an interesting quote from Daneil Pedrotty, director of the AFL-CIO’s Office of Investment, who thinks employers are squeezing more work out of few people by exploiting a “climate of fear”: “There are five applicants for every opening.  You have to work harder, or your job either will be done away with or outsourced.  Companies would just as soon open a factory in India as Peoria.”

No, they wouldn’t, or they already would have done so.  No CEO looks at pins in Peoria and Calcutta on a world map, shrugs, and says “Whichever.  I don’t know, flip a coin.”  They choose Calcutta because they have to.  They outsource when hiring American workers, or building facilities on American soil, no longer makes economic sense.  Both sentiment and practical considerations cause them to prefer American locations.  No sane executive would prefer to manage facilities on the other side of the world, commuting thousands of miles for meetings or inspections.  If companies truly would “just as soon open a factory in India as Peoria,” there has been very little stopping them for decades.  Are we supposed to believe America just keeps winning those coin tosses?

Furthermore, the idea of reducing personnel needs by enslaving current employees through a “climate of fear” is ignorant rubbish.  Anecdotal cases surely exist, but the bulk of job creation, on a national scale, is a response to demand. The ABC report makes much of the contrast between falling job creation and rising corporate profits, missing the point that long-term hiring decisions are made in anticipation of future opportunity.  Uncertainty breeds hesitation and thwarts expansion.

Look at it this way: suppose the government simply hired everyone, and guaranteed them a splendid income.  What would they all do? The government could give them make-work jobs, but this would not be a response to demand, so it wouldn’t last very long.  Every aspect of the economy, from consumer prices to interest rates, would be thrown wildly off kilter by a horde of people getting paid $30,000 per year to do whatever a government bureaucrat can think up… or more likely do nothing at all while waiting for the Federal Bureau of Imaginary Jobs to come up with something.  The government would quickly go bankrupt, while citizens waiting in line to buy ten-dollar loaves of stale Wonder Bread.  You don’t have to imagine what this looks like – just crack open a history book and look up “Soviet Union.”

Only demand and opportunity sustain job growth.  People need each other.  The only way government can help them hook up, and generate wealth through commerce, is to get out of the way.  Wise observers will expect robust, sustained job growth when they see signs of that happening.

This marks the nineteenth consecutive month of unemployment being over 9%.  The media continues to vilify George Bush, but do you know how many months the unemployment rate was over 9% during the Bush administration?  Try ZERO.

The worst month for unemployment for George W. Bush was 7.8% – which, interestingly, was the same worst month as Bill Clinton (who, as we all know, paved the streets with gold) had.

Nineteen straight months of 9+ percent unemployment.  Versus zero months.  So we blame the guy with the zero months for the record of the guy with the nineteen straight months.  And this from the very people who constantly harp about “fairness.”

Let’s blame the guy who had an unprecedented 52-consecutive months of job growth, rather than consider the policies of the guy who has clearly imploded our economy.

Let’s blame the guy who had one of the best records for appointing people with private sector business experience, rather than the guy with the worst record in history:

Whatever we do, let’s NOT blame the guy who doubled and then tripled the debt in the most massive spending binge in American history:

This ‘Blame Bush’ Crap Has Just GOT To End

George Bush inherited the policies that led to the 9/11 disaster only months into his presidency.  George Bush inherited the Dotcom disaster that wiped out 78% of the Nasdaq index along with $7.1 trillion in American wealth that was just vaporized as a result of Bill Clinton’s economy.  And rather than spend the next two years blaming his predecessor, Bush cut taxes and turned the economy around.  At least until Democrat policies such as the Community Reinvestment Act and Democrat refusal to reform and regulate Democrat-created Fannie and Freddie brought America crashing down.

Why don’t we blame the president who actually sued banks to force them to make bad loans to people who couldn’t afford the home loans that the banks were forced to provide???

By the standard the Democrats used to demonize George Bush in 2004, Barack Obama is the worst president in American history.

But the media prefers “the unexpected” to “the truth.”

For the record, I am rather fed up with “unexpected” lousy economic news that anyone with a scintilla of common sense saw coming before Obama even took office.

Why Did Our Economy Melt Down In 2008? (Email This To Your Friends)

Note: I did not write the following; I am only passing it along.  I hope you read it and then pass it along as well.

Remember the LONG-TERM Causes of the Financial Sector Meltdown (an email pre-formatted for sending)
FreedomKeys.com ^ | 20101010 | various
Posted on 10/23/2010 12:49:32 PM PDT by FreeKeys

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
by novelist Orson Scott Card, a Democrat
_________
.. This [financial crisis] was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it.  One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules.  The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.
..
Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans.  (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me.  It’s as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.) …
..
If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.
..
If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis. …
..
So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all?  Do you even know what honesty means?
..
[Was] getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for? …
..
… tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis.  You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.
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This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.
..
If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.
– Novelist Orson Scott Card, a Democrat, on October 5, 2008,HERE
..
.. The Financial Sector Meltdown ..
1.  Almost all of the financial problems we see today are based on bad mortgage lending.  That would be lending money to people to buy homes who didn’t qualify for a loan.
..
2.  The Democrats, under Clinton, strengthened a government-created monster called the “Community Reinvestment Act” [first foisted upon the country under Jimmy Carter].  This law was then used by “activists” and “community organizers” …  to coerce lending institutions to make these bad loans … millions of them.
..
3.  Now we see what happens when political “wisdom” supplants good loan underwriting.  When private financial institutions are virtually forced to make loans to people with a bad credit and job history … this is what you get.  Enjoy it. — Neal Boortz, here ..

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.
Enough cards on this table have been turned over that the story is now clear. The economic history books will describe this episode in simple and understandable terms: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded, and many bystanders were injured in the blast, some fatally.
..
Fannie and Freddie did this by becoming a key enabler of the mortgage crisis. They fueled Wall Street’s efforts to securitize subprime loans by becoming the primary customer of all AAA-rated subprime-mortgage pools. In addition, they held an enormous portfolio of mortgages themselves.
..
In the times that Fannie and Freddie couldn’t make the market, they became the market.
.. — Kevin Hassett, Bloomberg News, here ..

 

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.. Obama choice helped Fannie block oversight
National security adviser tied to discrediting of probe ..
By Jim McElhatton, The Washington Times,October 13, 2010 here
..
UNDER SCRUTINY: Thomas E. Donilon worked as a registered lobbyist for Fannie Mae from 1999 to 2005.
..
Years before Fannie Mae foundered amid a massive accounting scandal, President Obama’s choice for national security adviser oversaw an office inside the mortgage giant that orchestrated a negative publicity blitz to fight attempts by Congress to increase government oversight, records show.
..
Thomas E. Donilon, who won the job as national security adviser this month, worked as a registered lobbyist for Fannie Mae from 1999 to 2005 at a time the company’s officials insisted finances were sound. He also earned more than $1.8 million in bonuses [from Frannie Mae] before the government took over the troubled company in the wake of an accounting scandal.
..
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Mr. Obama, who railed against lobbyists on the campaign trail, hailed Mr. Donilon’s appointment last week, but made no mention of his time as a registered lobbyist.st wee
..

 

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..
Democrats and some [big-government] Republicans opposed reform in part because Fannie and Freddie were very good at greasing palms. Fannie has spent $170 million on lobbying since 1998 and $19.3 million on political contributions since 1990.
..
The principal recipient of Fannie Mae’s largesse was a Democrat, Sen. Chris Dodd (D, CT), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. No. 2 was another Democrat, Sen. Barack Obama (D, IL).
..
Mr. Dodd was also the second largest recipient in the Senate of contributions from Countrywide’s political action committee and its employees, and the recipient of a home loan from Countrywide at well below market rates.  The No. 1 senator on Countrywide’s list? Barack Obama. Check it out here:  http://tinyurl.com/4h9955
..

 

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..
“Congressman Frank and Senator Dodd wanted the government to push financial institutions to lend to people they would not lend to otherwise, because of the risk of default.
..
“The idea that politicians can assess risks better than people who have spent their whole careers assessing risks should have been so obviously absurd that no one would take it seriously.” — Dr. Thomas Sowell, Professor Emeritus, Economics, Stanford University, HERE
..

 

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..
When the Bush administration tried to rein in Freddie and Fannie from continuing to engage in risky practices, guess who stepped in to block their efforts? Democratic senators Chris Dodd, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and — are you ready? — Barack Obama.
..
Meanwhile, guess who were the top four recipients of campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie between 1988 and 2008?
..
Senators Chris Dodd, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and — still ready? — Barack Obama.
..
A coincidence, I tell you — just a coincidence.
..
More mere coincidences: Franklin Raines — a former Carter- and Clinton-administration official and former head of Fannie Mae, now under investigation for cooking its books — had a lot of powerful people in Congress beholden to his agency. Here is a list of his campaign-contribution recipients. Meanwhile, Democratic honcho Jim Johnson, another former Fannie Mae CEO, has been an economic adviser to and major fundraiser for Barack Obama, and even ran his vice-presidential search committee until growing scandals over his Fannie management forced him to step down in July. – Robert Bidinotto, here ..

 

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..
On May 25, 2006, Sen. John McCain spoke forcefully on behalf of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005.  He said on the floor of the Senate:
..
“Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae’s regulator reported that the company’s quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were “illusions deliberately and systematically created” by the company’s senior management, which resulted in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal.
..
“The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight’s report goes on to say that Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives. In the case of Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae’s former chief executive officer, OFHEO’s report shows that over half of Mr. Raines’ compensation for the 6 years through 2003 was directly tied to meeting earnings targets. The report of financial misconduct at Fannie Mae echoes the deeply troubling $5 billion profit restatement at Freddie Mac.
..
” The OFHEO report also states that Fannie Mae used its political power to lobby Congress in an effort to interfere with the regulator’s examination of the company’s accounting problems. This report comes some weeks after Freddie Mac paid a record $3.8 million fine in a settlement with the Federal Election Commission and restated lobbying disclosure reports from 2004 to 2005. These are entities that have demonstrated over and over again that they are deeply in need of reform.
..
“For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–known as Government-sponsored entities or GSEs–and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. OFHEO’s report this week does nothing to ease these concerns. In fact, the report does quite the contrary. OFHEO’s report solidifies my view that the GSEs need to be reformed without delay.
..
“I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.
..
“I urge my colleagues to support swift action on this GSE reform legislation.”
..
It died at the hands of the DEMOCRATS —
HERE’s a video clip showing their anger.
..

 

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..
“Many politicians and pundits claim that the credit crunch and high mortgage foreclosure rate is an example of market failure and want government to step in to bail out creditors and borrowers at the expense of taxpayers who prudently managed their affairs. These financial problems are not market failures but government failure. … The credit crunch and foreclosure problems are failures of government policy.” — Dr. Walter E. Williams, the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University, HERE
..

 

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“Barack Obama wasn’t just the second-largest recipient of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac political contributions. He was also the senator from ACORN, the activist leader for risky ‘affirmative action’ loans. … [The CRA] gave groups such as ACORN a license and a means to intimidate banks … ACORN employed its tactics in 1991 by taking over the House Banking Committee room for two days to protest efforts to scale back the CRA. … Obama represented ACORN in a 1994 suit against redlining.  ACORN was also a driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision pushed through by the Clinton administration that greatly expanded the CRA and helped spawn the current financial crisis. Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort.” — IBD Editorials
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“The Woods Fund report makes it clear Obama was fully aware of the intimidation tactics used by ACORN’s Madeline Talbott in her pioneering [“community organizer”] efforts to force banks to suspend their usual credit standards. Yet he supported Talbott in every conceivable way. He trained her personal staff and other aspiring ACORN leaders, he consulted with her extensively, and he arranged a major boost in foundation funding [via CAC and Woods Fund] for her efforts.” — Stanley Kurtz, “BARACK’S ‘ORGAANIZER’ BUDS PUSHED FOR BAD MORTGAGES”HERE
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Bloomberg News has an excellent recap of
the history of the financial meltdown:.HERE.
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Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama
not shown: Bill Clinton

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“Scratch the surface of an endemic problem — famine, illness, poverty —  and you invariably find a politician at the source.” —  Simon Carr

 

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“One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.” — Ayn Rand

 

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“I think that we all need to consider the possibility … just the possibility … that Obama is engaged in a conscious effort to destroy our free market economy so that he can build a government-controlled socialist party on the rubble.” — Neal Boortz, here
[Conscious effort or not, we have an emergency on our hands.]

 

Who REALLY Exploded Your Economy, Liberals Or Conservatives?

From Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny, pages 67-71:

From where does the Statist acquire his clairvoyance in determining what is good for the public?  From his ideology.  The Statist is constantly manipulating public sentiment in a steady effort to disestablish the free market, as he pushes the nation down tyranny’s road.  He has built an enormous maze of government agencies and programs, which grow inexorably from year to year, and which intervene in and interfere with the free market.  And when the Statist’s central planners create economic perversions that are seriously detrimental to the public, he blames the free market and insists on seizing additional authority to correct the failures created at his own direction.

Consider the four basic events that led to the housing bust of 2008, which spread to the financial markets and beyond:

EVENT 1: In 1977, Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) to address alleged discrimination by banks in making loans to poor people and minorities in the inner cities (redlining).  The act provided that banks have “an affirmative obligation” to meet the credit needs of the communities in which they are chartered.¹ In 1989, Congress amended the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act requiring banks to collect racial data on mortgage applications.² University of Texas economics professor Stan Liebowitz has written that “minority mortgage applications were rejected more frequently than other applications, but the overwhelming reason wasn’t racial discrimination, but simply that minorities tend to have weaker finances.”³ Liebowitz also condemns a 1992 study conducted by the Boston Federal Reserve Bank that alleged systemic discrimination.  “That study was tremendously flawed.  A colleague and I … showed that the data it had used contained thousands of egregious typos, such as loans with negative interest rates.  Our study found no evidence of discrimination.”⁴ However, the study became the standard on which government policy was based.

In 1995, the Clinton administration’s Treasury Department issued regulations tracking loans by neighborhoods, income groups, and races to rate the performance of banks.  The ratings were used by regulators to determine whether the government would approve bank mergers, acquisitions, and new branches.⁵ The regulations also encouraged Statist-aligned groups, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, to file petitions with regulators, or threaten to, to slow or even prevent banks from conducting their business by challenging the extent to which banks were issuing these loans.  With such powerful leverage over banks, some groups were able, in effect, to legally extort banks to make huge pools of money available to the groups, money they in turn used to make loans.  The banks and community groups issued loans to low-income individuals who often had bad credit or insufficient income.  And these loans, which became known as “subprime” loans, made available 100 percent financing, did not always require the use of credit scores, and were even made without documenting income.⁶ Therefore, the government insisted that banks, particularly those that wanted to expand, abandon traditional underwriting standards.  One estimate puts the figure of CRA-eligible loans at $4.5 trillion.⁷

EVENT 2: In 1992, the Department of Housing and Urban Development pressured two government-chartered corporations – known as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae – to purchase (or “securitize”) large bundles of these loans for the conflicting purposes of diversifying the risks and making even more money available to banks to make further risky loans.  Congress also passed the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act, eventually mandating that these companies buy 45% of all loans from people of low and moderate incomes.⁸ Consequently, a SECONDARY MARKET was created for these loans.  And in 1995, the Treasury Department established the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which provided banks with tax dollars to encourage even more risky loans.

For the Statist, however, this was still not enough.  Top congressional Democrats, including Representative Barney Frank (Massachusetts), Senator Christopher Dodd (Connecticut), and Senator Charles Schumer (New York), among others, repeatedly ignored warnings of pending disaster, insisting that they were overstated, and opposed efforts to force Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to comply with usual business and oversight practices.⁹ And the top executives of these corporations, most of whom had worked in or with Democratic administrations, resisted reform while they were actively cooking the books in order to award themselves tens of millions of dollars in bonuses.¹⁰

EVENT 3: A by-product of this government intervention and social engineering was a financial instrument called the “derivative,” which turned the subprime mortgage market into a ticking time bomb that could magnify the housing bust by orders of magnitude.  A derivative is a contract where one party sells the risk associated with the mortgage to another party in exchange for payments to that company based on the value of the mortgage.  In some cases, investors who did not even make the loans would bet on whether the loans would be subject to default.  Although imprecise, perhaps derivatives in this context can best be understood as a form of insurance.  Derivatives allowed commercial and investment banks, individual companies, and private investors to further spread – and ultimately multiply – the risk associated with their mortgages.  Certain financial and insurance institutions invested heavily in derivatives, such as American International Group (AIG).¹¹

EVENT 4:  The Federal Reserve Board’s role in the housing boom-and-bust cannot be overstated.  The Pacific Research Institute’s Robert P. Murphy explains that “[the Federal Reserve] slashed rates repeatedly starting in January 2001, from 6.5 percent until they reached a low in June 2003 of 1.0 percent.  (In nominal terms, this was the lowest the target rate had been in the entire data series maintained by the St. Louis Federal Reserve, going back to 1982)….  When the easy-money policy became too inflationary for comfort, the Fed (under [Alan] Greenspan and the then new Chairman Ben Bernanke at the end) began a steady process of raising interest rates back up, from 1.0 percent in June 2004 to 5.25 percent in June 2006….”¹² Therefore, when the Federal Reserve abandoned its role as steward of the monetary system and used interest rates to artificially and inappropriately manipulate the housing market, it interfered with normal market conditions and contributed to destabilizing the economy.

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¹ Howard Husock, “The Trillion-Dollar Shakedown that Bodes Ill for Cities,” City Journal, Winter 2000.

² Stan Liebowitz, “The Real Scandal,” New York Post, Feb. 5, 2008.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Howard Husock, “The Financial Crisis and the CRA,” City Journal, Oct. 30, 2008.

⁶ Liebowitz, “The Real Scandal.”

⁷ Husock, “The Financial Crisis and the CRA.”

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Editorial, “Fannie Mae’s Patron Saint,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10, 2008; Joseph Goldstein, “Pro-Deregulation Schumer Scores Bush For Lack of Regulation,” New York Sun, Sept. 22, 2008; Robert Novack, “Crony Image Dogs Paulson’s Rescue Effort,” Chicago-Sun Times, July 17, 2008.

¹⁰ Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, “Report of the Special Examination of Freddie Mac,” Dec. 2003; Office of Federal Housing Oversight, “Report of the Special Examination of Fannie Mae,” May 2006.

¹¹ Lynnley Browning, “AIG’s House of Cards,” Portfolio.com, Sept. 28, 2008.

¹² Robert P. Murphy, “The Fed’s Role in the Housing Bubble,” Pacific Research Institute blog.

The government links from footnote 10 have been purged (and I COUNT on left-leaning “news” sources to purge stories that reveal the left for what it is), but there is plenty of evidence that a) Fannie and Freddie were firmly in the hands of Democrats; b) that Democrats and Fannie/Freddie at least twice resisted reforms by President Bush and Republicans; and c) that Fannie and Freddie executives – who were deeply involved with Democrat activism – actively cooked the books to obtain huge bonuses prior to the disastrous crash.  We can also demonstrate d) that Barack Obama and Chris Dodd were involved with corrupt Fannie and Freddie (and Obama and Dodd were also receiving large contributions from corrupt Lehman Bros. even as Obama was getting a sweetheart mortgage deal from corrupt Tony Rezko while Chris Dodd was getting sweetheart mortgage deasl from corrupt Countrywide) right up to the tops of their pointy little heads.

When one examines the actual factors that led to the housing mortgage meltdown (as Mark Levin documents), when one examines the Democrat’s patent refusal to even accept that there was even a problem with Fannie and Freddie – much less allow any regulation – prior to the ensuing disaster, and when one examines the record to see which politicians were receiving money from the parties most responsible for the disaster, there is clearly only one party to blame: the Democrat Party.

And they are right back to all their old tricks.  It was rampant and insane spending that got us into this financial black hole – and they want MORE on top of MORE spending.  Meanwhile, Democrats such as Barney Frank are hard at work trying to create the NEXT massively destructive housing bubble, ACORN is trying to seize houses from rightful owners in the name of the “poor,” liberals are making moral hazard that rewards recklessness and irresponsibility and punishes frugality and responsibility official government policy , even as the Obama administration is creating “solutions” to the foreclosure issue that have abjectly failed.