JP Morgan And MF Global Prove That Democrat Regulations DON’T WORK. Democrats Create Disasters And Then Run By Demagoguing Those Disasters.

Democrats are saying that 2,320 pages of regulations wasn’t anywhere NEAR enough.  They say they need total dictatorial control over the economy in order to adequately regulate it.

Notice that both Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank (as in, “the Dodd-Frank Act”) are both GONE now???

And yet the monster they created lives on.

Many rules are STILL BEING WRITTEN.  That 2,320 pages will grow and grow and grow without end.

An article written a couple of days ago underscores this and a few other salient facts:

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the most sweeping financial law enacted since the Great Depression, is supposed to protect investors and shield the economy from bubbles and speculation. Its promise is hard to judge; many detailed rules are still being drafted. What can be said with confidence is that Dodd-Frank has been a boon for lobbyists.

In that single sentence, we find: 1) Dodd-Frank was a complete lie and resulted in a complete fiasco; 2) the damn thing that is already a monster is growing into an even bigger monster all around us; and 3) Obama and Democrats LOVE lobbyists in spite of their sanctimonious self-righteous hypocritical denials.

We’ve just suffered the disaster of MF Global in which an EXTREMELY CLOSE ALLY AND PARTNER WITH THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION directly led to the collapse and bankruptcy of MF Global and the disappearance of $1.6 BILLION in investor funds.

We’ve just suffered the disaster of JP Morgan – which donated HUGE campaign money to Obama, for the record (see here and here for the proof) – just lost $2 billion.  With those losses reasonably expected to exceed $4.2 BILLION.

Now, speaking of what is “reasonable,” it is “reasonable” to point out that the Democrat rhetoric demonizing George Bush for failing to regulate, etc. was a complete load of hogwash and that the Democrats’ have refuted themselves.  But that’s not the way the Democrat fascist mind works: rather, Democrats are actually arguing that their abject failure to regulate in spite of supermassive regulations requires more and MORE regulation.

There’s just no end to their stupidity.  Or to their crony-capitalist fascism.

Democrats promised that they would end “too big to fail” by preventing the movement toward getting bigger.  They accomplished the EXACT OPPOSITE: Banks are now THIRTY PERCENT BIGGER than when Dodd-Frank passed and they are in fact bigger as a direct consequence of Dodd-Frank as banks responded to the witch hunts by growing big and powerful enough to resist said witch hunts:

Two years after President Barack Obama vowed to eliminate the danger of financial institutions becoming “too big to fail,” the nation’s largest banks are bigger than they were before the credit crisis.

Five banks – JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. — held $8.5 trillion in assets at the end of 2011, equal to 56 percent of the U.S. economy, according to the Federal Reserve.

Five years earlier, before the financial crisis, the largest banks’ assets amounted to 43 percent of U.S. output. The Big Five today are about twice as large as they were a decade ago relative to the economy, sparking concern that trouble at a major bank would rock the financial system and force the government to step in as it did during the 2008 crunch.

“Market participants believe that nothing has changed, that too-big-to-fail is fully intact,” said Gary Stern, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

That specter is eroding faith in Obama’s pledge that taxpayer-funded bailouts are a thing of the past. It is also exposing him to criticism from Federal Reserve officials, Republicans and Occupy Wall Street supporters, who see the concentration of bank power as a threat to economic stability.

Let’s compare that list to the list of the biggest Obama donors:

Goldman Sachs, check.  Citigroup, check.  Bank of America, check.  And JP Morgan Chase, check check.  Oh, and Wells Fargo, check.

It’s really just astonishing to anybody but someone like me – WHO SAYS ALL THE DAMN TIME THAT BARACK OBAMA IS A GENUINELY EVIL MAN – that Obama rammed a fascist crony capitalist takeover of the banking system through Congress promising to end too big to fail, and yet somehow mysteriously that legislation ended up benefitting the very list of banks that gave Obama more money than ANYBODY.

It’s the exact same damn fascist thing with Obama and the BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN TAXPAYER MONEY HE GAVE TO HIS DONORS WITH THE GREEN ENERGY BOONDOGGLE. 

There’s kind of a trend there.

When a political party promises to regulate and reform to prevent collapses and bubbles and end the too big to fail mindset, and then they do the VERY OPPOSITE thing that they said they’d do, and as a result of their doing the very opposite thing that they promised they say they need more power, and you believe them and vote for them, there is something profoundly wrong with you.

Demon-possessed Democrats (“Democrat” actually stands for “Demonic Bureaucrat,” by the way) played this game once in 2008.

It was DEMOCRATS and DEMOCRAT POLICIES that blew up our economy in 2008.  Bill Clinton radically expanded the housing-bubble-creating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by dramatically expanding the program that gave housing mortgages to people who could not afford them:

Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending
By STEVEN A. HOLMES
Published: September 30, 1999

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

For the factual record, that was something Bill Clinton blessed George Bush with just before he left office to go along with the Dotcom bubble collapse recession that wiped out 78% of the Nasdaq portfolio, and in fact vaporized more than 7.1 TRILLION DOLLARS in American wealth.  Which collapsed on Bush just before the 9/11 disaster that happened because Bill Clinton let in every single terrorist who attacked us and allowed them to get trained, organized and funded completely on his watch.  So thanks for those land mines that were guaranteed to blow up, Slick Willie.

Wicked, depraved, demon-possessed Democrats blame George Bush.  But George Bush tried SEVENTEEN TIMES to reform and regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but Democrats thwarted him every single time.  From US News and World Report:

Seventeen. That’s how many times, according to this White House statement (hat tip Gateway Pundit), that the Bush administration has called for tighter regulation of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

I’ve written about this ad nauseum:

For the record, “8,000 billion” is another way of saying $8 TRILLION DOLLARS. That’s what Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Democrat Party have cost us.

It was Democrats who established Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It has been Democrats who have controlled the staffing of both agencies for decades. It was Democrats – and particularly it was Barack Obama – who took more campaign money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than ANYONE. It was Democrats who refused to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when George Bush and later John McCain repeatedly pleaded for such regulation and reform of the out-of-control agencies. It was Democrats like Franklin Raines who were running Fannie and Freddie when all the policies that led us down the road to hell were imposed, just as it was Democrats who were running Fannie and Freddie when the fecal matter started hitting the rotary oscillator.

It was a Democrat who said that everything was fine with Fannie and Freddie less than TWO MONTHS before they completely collapsed:

REP. BARNEY FRANK, D-MASS, July 14, 2008: 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.

And I think that anybody who respects what you think is a deluded and deranged dumbass, Mr. Frank.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are now in control of 96.5% of all mortgages, for those who don’t think they’re all that important in their role of creating the mortgage meltdown. It was Fannie and Freddie that bundled all the bad mortgages into mortgage-backed securities and then sold the mortgage-backed and debt securities to domestic and international capital investors under the illusion that they were guaranteed by the federal government.

Fannie and Freddie were a $5 trillion wasted boondoggle BEFORE things got even worse. They exist only to help liberals and lose money. And there’s no end in sight.

How bad is it???

Just how bad is the news at Fannie/Freddie? On Friday morning, Moody’s downgraded their outstanding preferred stock 5 notches from A1 to Baa3 (a slight gradation above junk) and their Bank Financial Strength Ratings (BSFR) to D+ from B- (one/half notch above D, which is reserved for companies in default). […]

I’ve pointed out which entity was directly behind the collapse of our economy in 2008.  Look who see who failed first and then triggered the catastrophic chain of financial destruction:

But in short, just take a look at the following timeline of our 2008 collapse and see which (Democrat) entity led the nation into implosion:

• September 7: Federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which at that point owned or guaranteed about half of the U.S.’s $12 trillion mortgage market, effectively nationalizing them. This causes panic because almost every home mortgage lender and Wall Street bank relied on them to facilitate the mortgage market and investors worldwide owned $5.2 trillion of debt securities backed by them.^[199][200]
• September 14: Merrill Lynch is sold to Bank of America amidst fears of a liquidity crisis and Lehman Brothers collapse^[201]
• September 15: Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy protection^[202]
• September 16: Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s downgrade ratings on AIG‘s credit on concerns over continuing losses to mortgage-backed securities, sending the company into fears of insolvency.^[203][204] In addition, the Reserve Primary Fund “breaks the buck” leading to a run on the money market funds. Over $140 billion is withdrawn vs. $7 billion the week prior. This leads to problems for the commercial paper market, a key source of funding for corporations, which suddenly could not get funds or had to pay much higher interest rates.^[205]
• September 17: The US Federal Reserve lends $85 billion to American International Group (AIG)to avoid bankruptcy.
• September 18: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke meet with key legislators to propose a $700 billion emergency bailout through the purchase of toxic assets. Bernanke tells them: “If we don’t do this, we may not have an economy on Monday.”^[206]
• September 19: Paulson financial rescue plan is unveiled after a volatile week in stock and debt markets.

And I point out the whole process and how it happened to show why the 2008 disaster happened to prove that Fannie and Freddie failing first was no mere coincidence, but in fact the trigger that set off the entire chain reaction of 2008:

In a nutshell, Fannie and Freddie, acting 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.

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, an intelligent observer would note a conflict: the GSE’s role was to “provide stability,” and yet 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 has allowed toxic instruments that have been sold across the world. 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.

John McCain wrote a letter in 2006 urging reform and regulation of the GSEs. He said:

Congress chartered Fannie and Freddie to provide access to home financing by maintaining liquidity in the secondary mortgage market. Today, almost half of all mortgages in the U.S. are owned or guaranteed by these GSEs. They are mammoth financial institutions with almost $1.5 Trillion of debt outstanding between them. With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would actually pay this debt if Fannie or Freddie could not?

And of course, they could not pay their debts. Fannie and Freddie basically went bankrupt and were taken over. And they took a whopping share of the biggest financial institutions down with them. Fannie is in the process of devouring nearly 400 billion dollars of bailout money from the American taxpayer. And now – GREAT GOOGLEY MOOGLEY – Obama is planning to funnel yet another $800 BILLION through the same Fannie and Freddie who already destroyed us once.

And thus you had a financial disaster created by one William Jefferson Clinton and one Democrat Party. And now a second act of economic destruction is being planned by Barack Obama.

The 2008 economic collapse that Democrats were elected to fix was itself created by Democrats who will now continue the very policies that created the disaster in the first place.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are now in control of 96.5% of all mortgages due to the corruption and fascist crony capitalism of the Democrat Party which has pretty much been allowed to run amok since 2007 (when they took control of the House and Senate) and which went completely insane when Barack Obama became president.

It was Democrats who blew up the economy with their stupid and demonic policies and it is Democrats who will make the rubble bounce by blowing it up all over again in a collapse that will make the Great Depression look like a walk on a warm sunny beach.

As a postscript, allow me to add that the problem is not and never has been that we don’t have enough regulations: we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of thousands of regulations such that the federal government has no idea how many different regulations they actually have on the books any more.  NO!  Rather the problem is that morality and ethics have disintegrated in America.

Founding father John Adams famously said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  His point was that a free society cannot exist unless morality and religion are cherished and taught for a very good reason: because people who do not have the foundation to self-govern must be forcibly governed by an increasingly totalitarian state.  And that view of John Adams was echoed by every single one of our founding fathers for very good reason.

The Democrat Party and the unjust judges the Democrat Party has imposed on us threw God out of America in in 1947 when they imposed a radical understanding of the Establishment Clause upon America.  In a particularly heinous maneuver, the Supreme Court ONLY considered the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state” from a private letter written by Thomas Jefferson to a church that had written expressing concern about the removal of religious liberty.  It’s not adequate to say that the Supreme Court took “separation between church and state” in 1947; they DEMANDED that the surrounding context be DENIED altogether.  The result in 1947 was an awful ruling that defied the previous 160 years of Supreme Court decisions and effectively abrogated the Declaration of Independence and the 1st Amendment in doing so.  The Supreme Court further acted on the secular humanist edifice it had artificially constructed for itself in 1962, when the Court threw out prayer in schools and threw the Ten Commandments out in 1980.  The liberal court decreed that:

“If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.”

God forbid that children think about God and morality.  Let’s teach them sodomy instead.

And now we have degenerated to the point in which an Obama-appointed federal judge is saying we should just get rid of the first four commandments that mention God.  Because this moral idiot doesn’t comprehend that the first four commandments commanding reverence for the Creator form the moral foundation for the six commands that ethical laws that have formed the basis of Western Civilization that emerged from the Judeo-Christian worldview.

If you are an older American who knew what this nation used to be like, and you wonder what the hell went so terribly wrong, now you should understand why: we threw God out of America; and in so doing we invited Satan in.  Pretty much every nasty thing, from violent crime, to venereal disease, to premarital sex, to single motherhood and abortion, to illiteracy, to suicide, to drug use, to public corruption, HAS EXPLODED.  We’ve become a country that is so overwhelmed with convicted criminals that it is now beyond impossible to keep them incarcerated and we literally have to let them go as worse criminals keep flooding into the system.

When I graduated from university in 1990 as a business major, I did not receive any classroom instruction on business ethics.  One professor pointed out that they had USED to teach ethics in previous years but had as a matter of policy stopped doing so.  And precisely what would have been the foundation of those “ethics” if we’d been allowed to be taught about “ethics”???  What ethics?  WHOSE ethics?  Based on what ethical system?

Not the Bible, that is for damned sure.  Not when the Supreme Court that inhabits a building whose founders and whose betters engraved images of Moses and the Ten Commandments upon them spurns the entire history of this great nation and replaces it with legally-imposed godlessness.

So the abortion society of death worship that Democrats created spirals wildly out of control.  And the amoral and irreligious people now therefore need mountains of regulations as they become more and more and more blatantly depraved and predatory.

And such a people must be controlled with more and more force.

Liberals frequently compare conservatives to some kind of intolerant Taliban; but THEY’RE the Taliban.  They are a radical secular humanist cult that has been increasingly rabidly determined to impose their agenda on this nation for the last 100 years.

64% Of Small Businesses Planning To Wait Out Obama, Will NOT Be Adding New Jobs (12% Say They Will CUT Jobs)

There’s the old conundrum about the wolf, the goat and the cabbage:

A farmer and his wolf, goat, and cabbage come to the edge of a river they wish to cross.  There is a boat at the river’s edge that only the farmer can row.  The farmer can take at most one other object besides himself on a crossing, but if the wolf is ever left with the goat, the wolf will eat the goat; similarly, if the goat is left with the cabbage, the goat will eat the cabbage.  How can the farmer get all of them across?

There’s actually a solution to that problem.

Now we’ve got an even more intractable problem, involving a healthy job-creating economy, a Marxist president and a Marxist Democrat Party.

This one is unsolvable, because unlike the above dilemma involving the wolf, the goat and the cabbage, BOTH the Marxist President AND the Marxist Democrat Party will devour the economy unless it is somehow taken away from them.  Like the goat with the cabbage, they will insatiably eat every job they can and turn those jobs into dead crap.  Like the wolf with the goat, they will kill the economy and systematically devour it until only bones are left.

We are still over a year away from getting the chance to save ourselves from this insoluble dilemma.

And here’s the consequence:

Little Hiring Seen by Small Business
JULY 11, 2011
By SIOBHAN HUGHES

WASHINGTON—The U.S. labor market could stay sluggish for a while, with small-business executives reluctant to hire amid the murky economic outlook.

A survey of small business owners shows a lack of
confidence in the U.S. economy. More than two-thirds indicated they do not plan
to add payrolls in 2011 or 2012. WSJ’s Siobhan Hughes reports. Photo: Justin
Sullivan/Getty Images

Almost two-thirds—64%—of small-business executives surveyed said they weren’t expecting to add to their payrolls in the next year and another 12% planned to cut jobs, according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce report to be released Monday. Just 19% said they would expand their work forces.

This comes after a Labor Department report Friday showed employers added few jobs in June, and unemployment rose to 9.2%. The bleak figures joined other data showing the recovery losing momentum in recent months, which has caused many analysts and policy makers to lower their forecasts for economic growth in the second half of the year.

The Small Business Administration says small businesses, defined as companies with fewer than 500 workers, employ about half of the workers in the private sector. In the Chamber’s survey of 1,409 executives, conducted by Harris Interactive, small businesses were defined as firms with revenue of $25 million or less.

More than half of the small-business executives in the June 27-30 survey cited economic uncertainty as the main reason for holding back on hiring. About a third blamed lack of sales, while just 7% pointed to problems getting credit.

“I think it’s safer to stay on hold and not hire workers,” said Harold Jackson, chief executive of Buffalo Supply, a Lafayette, Colo., distributor of high-tech medical equipment used in operating rooms.

Mr. Jackson said he has halved his staff to 15 workers since 2009 and was unlikely to start hiring soon even if his business picked up. “I can handle a reasonably large increase in business without having to increase the staff.”

Many of the executives surveyed were gloomy about the economy’s prospects. About 41% see the business climate getting worse over the next two years, compared with 29% who expect the climate to improve.

The modest hiring plans of small businesses don’t make up for the job losses in the past year, when some 29% let go workers, far outpacing the numbers that now plan to hire.

As the wise philosopher Scoobert Doo once put it upon hearing dire news, “Roh-roh.”

Between ObamaCare and the massive $500 billion in taxes it’s going to take out of the private sector, along with the 158 government bureaucracies and the thousands of pages of regulations; between the trillion dollars in NEW taxes Obama is demanding as part of any debt ceiling deal; between the Obama EPA which is simply ruling by fiat and imposing regulations that were actually voted down by Congress; between the fact that Obama won’t let us drill for our own oil even as his green energy sends the cost of energy (in his own words) “skyrocketing”; between the Obama NRLB that is openly warring with companies like Boeing for creating jobs in non-union states; between the Obama Labor Department, which is putting together some 100 job-killing regulations to strangle businesses from further hiring as we speak; and between the Dodd-Frank legislation which will systematically cut businesses off from credit, we are pretty well screwed.

We can have jobs, or we can have Obama and his Democrats.  But we’re not going to get jobs until we get rid of the people who are demonizing the job creators.  And that should just be an obvious fact by now.

AP-Reported FACT: U.S. Economy The Worst Since The LAST Time We Let A Socialist Run It

The Los Angeles Times print edition ran this story on July 2 under the considerably more Marxist headline, “Wealthy benefit from recovery as workers struggle“:

U.S. Recovery’s 2-Year Anniversary Arrives With Little To Celebrate
First Posted: 07/ 1/11 05:33 PM ET Updated: 07/ 1/11 05:33 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — This is one anniversary few feel like celebrating.

Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.

After previous recessions, people in all income groups tended to benefit. This time, ordinary Americans are struggling with job insecurity, too much debt and pay raises that haven’t kept up with prices at the grocery store and gas station. The economy’s meager gains are going mostly to the wealthiest.

Workers’ wages and benefits make up 57.5 percent of the economy, an all-time low. Until the mid-2000s, that figure had been remarkably stable — about 64 percent through boom and bust alike.

[…]

But if the Great Recession is long gone from Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, it lingers on Main Street:

— Unemployment has never been so high — 9.1 percent — this long after any recession since World War II. At the same point after the previous three recessions, unemployment averaged just 6.8 percent.

— The average worker’s hourly wages, after accounting for inflation, were 1.6 percent lower in May than a year earlier. Rising gasoline and food prices have devoured any pay raises for most Americans.

— The jobs that are being created pay less than the ones that vanished in the recession. Higher-paying jobs in the private sector, the ones that pay roughly $19 to $31 an hour, made up 40 percent of the jobs lost from January 2008 to February 2010 but only 27 percent of the jobs created since then.

[…]

Hard times have made Americans more dependent than ever on social programs, which accounted for a record 18 percent of personal income in the last three months of 2010 before coming down a bit this year. Almost 45 million Americans are on food stamps, another record.

[…]

Because the labor market remains so weak, most workers can’t demand bigger raises or look for better jobs.

“In an economic cycle that is turning up, a labor market that is healthy and vibrant, you’d see a large number of people quitting their jobs,” says Gluskin Sheff economist Rosenberg. “They quit because the grass is greener somewhere else.”

Instead, workers are toughing it out, thankful they have jobs at all. Just 1.7 million workers have quit their job each month this year, down from 2.8 million a month in 2007.

The toll of all this shows in consumer confidence, a measure of how good people feel about the economy. According to the Conference Board’s index, it’s at 58.5. Healthy is more like 90. By this point after the past three recessions, it was an average of 87.

How gloomy are Americans? A USA Today/Gallup poll eight weeks ago found that 55 percent think the recession continues, even if the experts say it’s been over for two years. That includes the 29 percent who go even further — they say it feels more like a depression.

Allow me to start with the second paragraph in the story:

“Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.”

The weakest and most lopsided of any recovery since the 1930s, you say???

WHO WAS PRESIDENT IN THE 1930s?  WHICH PARTY DOMINATED BOTH THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE IN THE 1930s?

And next let me ask you, “Are there any similarities between socialist Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and socialist Democrat Barack Hussein Obama???  And the answer is, “HELL YES THERE ARE!!!”:

Which is to say, “This is the worst the U.S. economy has ever been since the LAST time we had a socialist just like FDR – and the mainstream media proudly hailed Obama as FDR and Obama’s as a NEW “New Deal.”

But here’s the truth:

FDR prolonged — not ended — great depression

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

”Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. ”We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

[…]

”The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. ”Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”

And of course all the “experts” the mainstream media love to trot out have all bought hook, line and sinker the notion that capitalism is something to be loathed and feared.  So they demand that America pursue asinine government stimulus policies that fail even by the “experts'” own standards, and then these same “experts” proceed to argue that the economy failing to recover somehow is proof that more of the same thing that already failed is necessary.

These “experts” whom the mainstream media give a loud microphone to to espouse their socialist views are pathologically incapable of seeing this connection between socialist policies and an economy in the doldrums.  Every bit of negative economic news is invariably “unexpected” (liberals favorite adjective to wave a hand at bad economic developments whenever a Democrat president is in charge), because these “experts” cannot separate the inevitable results of their ideology from their terribly failed ideology.  There has to be a disconnect, or more commonly, a scapegoat.

I can simply re-cite my conclusion from a previous article to find a particularly laughable example of this phenomena:

I think of the Soviet Union, which literally blamed the total failure of their entire political philosophy and the ruinous policies that philosophy entailed by claiming that their agricultural output had been adversely affected due to 72 years of bad weather.  And the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Dodo bird for that very reason.

Is America under Obama the next Dodo bird to fall apart while we’re assured that everything is fine while some suitable scapegoat bears the blame for every failure that can’t be ignored???

It couldn’t be the fact that socialism is nothing more than state-planned economic failure.  It had to be something else, ANYTHING else.

The Big Brother from the novel 1984 had Emmanuel Goldstein.  The Big Brother who is now occupying our White House has George W. Bush.

The next obvious question to ask and answer is, “Why are the wealthy benefitting while the workers struggle?”

The answer is twofold: 1) because when you attack the employers, the first thing to go is the employees and 2) because that’s exactly how crony capitalism works.

There is a magnificent book entitled, New Deal Or Raw Deal?  How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, which should be required reading.  Burton Folsom Jr. points out that when FDR structured his many policies and regulations that strangled economic growth, he did so in such a way that favored the big crony capitalist corporations at the expense of the smaller businesses that could no longer compete given the costly regulatory requirements.  The smaller businesses were forced out of the market while the big businesses protected themselves with insider deals based on access to and influence with the government that only they could afford.  And there is no question whatsoever that – even as FDR employed the class warfare of socialism – the rich got richer while the poor got poorer.  Income tax revenues plunged as the wealthy sheltered their wealth from the high tax rates and the poor paid an increasingly high overall percentage of tax revenues via excise taxes.  Regulations mandating higher pay for workers priced those workers right out of their jobs.  Folsom provides the official data to back it up.

Check out this fact from page 127 of New Deal or Raw Deal?:

In 1929, prior to FDR demonizing the rich, income taxes accounted for 38% of total revenue collected, and corporate income taxes accounted for 43%.  Excise taxes which burdened the poor only counted for 19% of revenues.  By 1938, the rich and the corporations had protected themselves from FDR’s demagogic tax policies (but the poor couldn’t), such that the only 24% was collected in income taxes (versus 38%) and only 29% from corporate income taxes (versus 43%).  Meanwhile the poor-punishing excise taxes (e.g. gasoline tax) soared from 19% to 47% of the total taxes collected.  Meanwhile, when income taxes were kept low, the wealthy invariably paid FAR MORE in the total tax revenue as they put their money out to invest in and expand the economy in pursuit of the profits.  And they created millions of jobs in doing so.

And guess what?  Regulations mandating higher wages are STILL killing jobs now that Obama is doing it.

And the exact same mindset is yielding the exact same results ALL OVER AGAIN.  Obama has put the fear of God (actually the fear of the Soviet-style STATE) into the wealthy and the corporations.  They keep hearing Obama demagogue them, and they keep sheltering their money.  And they will CONTINUE to keep doing that until the threat of Obama is gone.  Just like they did with FDR.

Here we are today, with “the New FDR,” Barack Obama.  Who is the top dog on Obama’s economic team?  Why lo and behold, it is none other than GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, crony capitalist extraordinaire whose big corporation has REPEATEDLY benefitted from a cozy insider relationship with big government.  And consider how Obama literally took big auto makers GM and Chrysler away from their legitimate shareholders and gave them to big unions.

Regarding “crony capitalism,” I made a sweeping statement in a previous article:

That said, there is also a deliberate and fundamental misunderstanding of fascism by the left.  If you read leftists, you come away thinking that somehow “fascism” is the takeover of a state by corporations. But stop and think: Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Hess and all the other key Nazis WEREN’T corporate CEOs who took over the state; THEY WERE SOCIALIST POLITICIANS WHO TOOK OVER THE CORPORATIONS.  They usurped the corporations and FORCED them to perform THEIR agenda.  They either performed the Nazis’ will or they were simply taken away from their rightful owners and nationalized.

And to the degree that German crony capitalist corporations helped Hitler in his rise to power, THEY WERE JUST MORE USEFUL IDIOTS.

The same sort of takeover of German corporations by socialists is building in America.  Take Maxine Waters, a liberal Democrat, as the perfect example.  What did she say of the oil companies?

“This liberal will be all about socializing … uh uh … would be about … basically … taking over … and the government running all of your companies.”

THAT’S what Hitler did, too.  Hitler got this power through regulations that required corporations to do his bidding, just like Obama has now REPEATEDLY done.

And then consider how willing Maxine Waters used “crony capitalism” (which is the essence of developing fascism) to directly personally benefit even as she shaped the banking industry.

The Democrat party is the party of socialism.  It is the party of Marxism.  It is the party of fascism.

I stand by that sweeping statement.  People need to realize that “Nazi” stood for “National SOCIALIST German Workers Party,” and that both Nazi socialism and Soviet socialism were big government socialist tyrannies that failed their people.  As to our own experiment with socialism here in the USA, I point out in an article that explains how “Government Sponsored Enterprises” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac policies led us into economic implosion in spite of warnings for YEARS prior to the 2008 economic collapse:

But rigid opposition from Democrats – especially Democrats like Senator Barack Obama – who took more campaign money from Fannie and Freddie and dirty crony capitalism outfits like corrupt Lehman Bros. than ANYONE in his short Senate stint – prevented any “hope and change” of necessary reform from saving the US economy.

The timeline is clear: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were giant behemoths that began to stagger under their own corrupt weight, as even the New York Times pointed out:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so big — they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market — that the thought that they might falter once seemed unimaginable. But now a trickle of worries about the companies, which has been slowly building for years, has suddenly become a torrent.

And it was FANNIE and FREDDIE that collapsed FIRST before ANY of the private investment banks, which collapsed as a result of having purchased the very mortgaged backed securities that the Government Sponsored Enterprises SOLD THEM.  It wasn’t until Fannie and Freddie collapsed that investors began to look with horror at all the junk that these GSE boondoggles had been pimping.

The man who predicted the collapse in 1999 wrote a follow-up article titled, “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.”  It really should have read, “Blame DEMOCRATS.”  Because they were crawling all over these GSEs that they had themselves created like the cockroaches they are.  But Wallison is nonpartisan

Barack and Michelle Obama have a documented personal history of crony capitalism:

The Chicago way is a very, very ugly way.  And Obama has been in it up to his eyeballs.  Chicago is a dirty place filled with dirty politicians – and Obama was perfectly at home with all the dirt.

That Chicago corruption extends right into Obama’s home, by way of his wife Michelle.  This is a woman who sat on high-paying boards in direct quid-pro-quo consequences of Obama advancing in public office.  And in some of those boards, she participated in the worst kind of hospital patient-dumping.

Here’s a video of Michelle Obama you ought to watch – if you can stand the revelations:

Too bad we voted to nationalize the Chicago Way.

I also pointed out that when you attacked employers, the ones who would be hit the most and the hardest would be EMPLOYEES.

Take a look at what’s happening to small businesses, which create at least half of all the jobs in America, under Obama.  How about the fewest new business startups since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it:

Through the 12 months ended in March of last year, 505,473 new businesses started up in the U.S., according to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the weakest growth since the bureau started tracking the data in the early 1990s. It’s down sharply from the record 667,341 new businesses added in the 12 months that ended in March 2006.

And we can tie this right back to crony capitalism, as Obama has created a system in which larger businesses are protected against the threat of competition from smaller businesses:

Many times large corporations will even lobby for more regulations  for their  own industry because they know that they can handle all of the  rules and  paperwork far easier than their smaller competitors can.   After all, a  large corporation with an accounting department can easily  handle filling out a  few thousand more forms, but for a small business  with only a handful  of employees that kind of paperwork is a major  logistical nightmare.

When it comes to hiring new employees, the federal government has  made the  process so complicated and so expensive for small businesses  that it is  hardly worth it anymore.  Things have gotten so bad that more  small  businesses than ever are only hiring part-time workers or  independent  contractors.

So what we actually have now is a situation where small businesses  have lots of incentives not to hire more workers, and if they really do need some extra help the rules make it much more profitable to do  whatever you can to keep from bringing people on as full-time   employees.

And who do all these rules and regulations hurt the most but the very people Democrats cynically and deceitfully claim they are trying to help?  Meanwhile, who does it help the most but the crony capitalist corporations who DON’T do most of the hiring in America who can profit from Obama’s war on business that results in the destruction of their small business competition.

A recent report by the National Federation of Independent Business points out that small businesses are planning to SHRINK rather than EXPAND their payrolls under Obama.  From the New York Times:

A Slowdown for Small Businesses
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: June 14, 2011

In the latest sign that the economic recovery may have lost whatever modest oomph it had, more small businesses say that they are planning to shrink their payrolls than say they want to expand them.

That is according to a new report released Tuesday by the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group that regularly surveys its membership of small businesses across America.

The federation’s report for May showed the worst hiring prospects in eight months. The finding provides a glimpse into the pessimism of the nation’s small firms as they put together their budgets for the coming season, and depicts a more gloomy outlook than other recent (if equally lackluster) economic indicators because this one is forward-looking.

While big companies are buoyed by record profits, many small businesses, which employ half of the country’s private sector workers, are still struggling to break even. And if the nation’s small companies plan to further delay hiring — or, worse, return to laying off workers, as they now hint they might — there is little hope that the nation’s 14 million idle workers will find gainful employment soon.

“Never in the 37-year history of our company have we seen anything at all like this,” said Frank W. Goodnight, president of Diversified Graphics, a publishing company in Salisbury, N.C. He says there is “no chance” he will hire more workers in the months ahead.

“We’re being squeezed on all sides,” he says.

So let me ask again the question that the Los Angeles Times phrased: “Why are the wealthy benefitting from the ‘recovery’ as workers struggle?

And the answer is simple: because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are socialist who have destroyed the engine that creates the jobs that workers depend upon to flourish.

An interesting fact is that businesses are now forced to spend $1.7 TRILLION a year in regulatory compliance costs.  That is a massive hidden tax on their viability; it exceeds the overt income taxes businesses have to pay, and it most certainly exceeds their profits.  And right now Obama is attacking them via the Dodd-Frank regulatory legislation, via the EPA, via OSHA, via ObamaCare and via the ridiculous actions of the NLRB in addition to their tax burden.  Just to name a few.  The result is businesses terrified to expand and further place their necks under Obama’s axe blade.

Meanwhile, Obama’s socialist policies have not only devastated the worker by destroying his jobs, but they’ve ruined America on numerous other levels, too.  Take the housing crisis – which was THE cause of the economic implosion of 2008.  Did Obama make it better?  Well, here’s a headline for you from CNBC: “US Housing Crisis Is Now Worse Than Great Depression.”  Which is to say that Democrats – who first created the housing crisis by refusing to allow the regulation of their pet socialist wealth redistribution agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – took something awful and turned it into an American Dream-massacring nightmare.

The latest job figures simply further document my point: Obama is destroying America job by job.  Not only did the unemployment rate go up to 9.2% (Obama promised the American people that the unemployment rate would be 7.1% by now if he got his massive government-spending stimulus); not only were the previous two month figures adjusted DOWNWARD by some 45,000 jobs; not only have a third of the unemployed been unemployed for at least a YEAR with fully half of the unemployed having been unemployed for over six months (which is unprecedented); not only did the economy create an incredibly dismal 18,000 jobs (versus the 100,000 the economists naively expected); but a quarter million more people simply walked away from the workforce entirely – abandoning any hope that Obama will do anything more than crush their hopes of finding a job.

Financial Reform ALREADY Injuring Economy

This is something else.

From Business Insider:

Financial Reform Meets First Huge Unintended Consequence As Ford Halts Bond Offering
Joe Weisenthal | Jul. 22, 2010, 8:57 AM

Whenever you get new laws and “reform,” unintended consequences are sure to follow.

Usually they take awhile.

Not so with Dodd-Frank.

WSJ reports that Ford has already yanked a bond deal, because the ratings agencies, fearing legal liability, won’t let the automaker puts their ratings in the prospectus, making a sale impossible.

So did Dodd-Frank just kill the bond market? Well, probably not.. Regulators will likely find some way around this impasse, but it’s still amusing to see the bill INSTANTLY slow down the gears of capitalism (or at least capital raising) as its fiercest critics might have suggested.

Click here to see 15 signs the economy is rolling over

Here’s the Wall Street Journal piece cited above:

JULY 21, 2010
Ford Scuttles Debt Deal as Overhaul Chills Market
BY ANUSHA SHRIVASTAVA

Ford Motor Co.’s financing arm pulled plans to issue new debt, the first casualty of a bond market thrown into turmoil by the financial overhaul signed into law Wednesday.

Market participants said the auto maker pulled a recent deal, backed by packages of auto loans, because it was unable to use credit ratings in its offering documents, a legal requirement for such sales. The company declined to comment.

The nation’s dominant ratings firms have in recent days refused to allow their ratings to be used in bond registration statements. The firms, including Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch …

Oh, well. Nobody needs those stupid jobs that Ford would have financed through an expansion, anyway.  And who really cares if numerous deals that would have happened don’t now because of “finance reform”?  Surely we’re all fine with scraping our own feces to heat our homes as in the other socialist Utopia in North Korea?  Who isn’t willing to personally suffer to punish those greedy businesses?

Analyst David Rosenberg, in agreement with other market experts such as Bob Farrell, said on CNBC that the Dow could challenge the terrifying lows of March 2009 and drop below 5,000.

Well, surely the Chairman of the Federal Reserve would bring confidence to the market.

Not so much:

Bernanke says economic outlook is ‘unusually uncertain’
In congressional testimony, the Fed chairman predicts that unemployment will remain stubbornly high for years. His comments send stocks down sharply.

By Don Lee and Walter Hamilton, Los Angeles Times
July 22, 2010

Reporting from Washington and Los Angeles —

Saying the economic outlook was “unusually uncertain,” Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke predicted that unemployment was likely to remain stubbornly high for several years, straining families and endangering the nation’s economic stability and competitiveness.

“Long-term unemployment not only imposes exceptional near-term hardships on workers and their families; it also erodes skills and may have long-lasting effects on workers’ employment and earnings prospects,” he said Wednesday in his semiannual testimony to Congress.

“This is the worst labor market, the worst episode, since the Great Depression,” Bernanke said of long-term unemployment. “Not only for the sake of the unemployed and for the short-term strength of the economy but also for a long-term viability in international competitiveness, I think we need to be very seriously concerned.”

We look at the financial reform imposed by the Democrats and realize that it will cost banks billions and make them even more reluctant to lend than they already are even as they pass the increased costs to their customers in the form of a tax from Obama to you.

Business leaders are flat-out stating that Obama’s economic policies are stifling growth.

And I go back to the prediction of chief executive officers made prior to the worst decision America ever made:

In October 2008 I wrote an article which quoted Chief Executive Magazine as follows:

In expressing their rejection of Senator Obama, some CEOs who responded to the survey went as far as to say that “some of his programs would bankrupt the country within three years, if implemented.” In fact, the poll highlights that Obama’s tax policies, which scored the lowest grade in the poll, are particularly unpopular among CEOs.

Barry Hussein is preaching about his “summer of economic recovery.”  But he’s a liar without shame or principle.

On the flip side of the “summer of economic recovery,” there’s actual reality.

From CNN Money, July 22, 2010:

Jobless claims jump in latest week
By Blake Ellis, staff reporterJuly 22, 2010: 9:28 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The number of Americans filing for initial unemployment insurance climbed last week, the government said Thursday.

There were 464,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended July 17, up 37,000 from a revised 427,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said.

The number of claims was much higher than expected. A consensus estimate of economists surveyed by Briefing.com expected new claims to rise to 445,000.

“It’s very disappointing to have this leading indicator of economic conditions jump higher,” said John Lonski, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “This is the latest reminder of a weak labor market, and the jump preserves worries regarding the adequacy of economic growth.”

The Democrats passed a 2,300 page bill that is essentially mystery meat, which creates more than 20 new agencies that will write hundreds of as-yet unwritten regulations.

And even the author of the bill doesn’t have a clue how the massive Rube Goldberg Machine boondoggle will work:

“It’s a great moment. I’m proud to have been here,” said a teary-eyed Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), who as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee led the effort in the Senate. “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works. But we believe we’ve done something that has been needed for a long time. It took a crisis to bring us to the point where we could actually get this job done.”

Never let a crisis go to waste.

If you are a Democrat, I suggest you burn your testicles off with a blowtorch.  Because that would be change.  And of course change is good.  And who really cares about the irrelevant details of “change,” anyway?

Analyst Meredith Whitney, famous for being one of the very, very few who predicted the economic disaster in 2008, has made another prediction that no one listened to:

“Financial Reform Will Cause ‘Tragic’ Unemployment Levels For An Extended Period Of Time“

So, as the economy descends into the hell of unintended consequences, please comfort yourselves with my assuring you that I told you so.